


you did your worst. you tried your best.

by angel_deux



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Because Show Jaime is Arthur Morgan and I will not be taking any further questions, Canon-Typical Violence, Cowboy au?, F/M, Inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, basically Cersei runs a gang and Brienne joins so she can kill Stannis, but those parts are EXTREMELY RDR2, old west au, outlaw au, really only the first part and the last part are very RDR2, there's a handjob in a lake at one point if that sweetens the pot a little, warning for some jaime/cersei
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-09-28 15:37:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20428331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Cowboy/Outlaw AU heavily inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2.Jaime is his sister's creature. They've been running from the law for years. Created their own gang. Had their own code of honor.Things were good, once. But Jaime hasn't felt good about the gang in a while. And then they meet Brienne.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is all happening because months ago I had a conversation with a friend in which I screamed about how surprised I was by how much I loved Arthur Morgan, the protag from RDR2, and how he reminded me of some of my favorite characters, including Netflix Frank Castle and also Jaime Lannister. And then like 3 days ago I realized just how similar Jaime's last character decisions were to Arthur's. There's a woman who cares about him (two, in arthur's case, I guess), there's a choice to go back to the only family he knows. There's a confrontation with a man with questionable facial hair on some rocks. It's all there, folks! So then I speed-wrote this and now I'm inflicting it on you.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it and I hope it isn't utter garbage like I'm worried it might be!!!

The Lannister Gang is at their lowest point in years when they meet the widow.

Cersei's the one who got them headed towards the cabin up in the mountains. Just she and Jaime and Gregor and fucking _Euron_, tromping through the snow on miserable, half-dead horses. The rest of the gang is waiting for them at the old mining camp a few miles back, because at least there are buildings there to keep out the wind of this endless blizzard. Jaime wishes Cersei had stayed back there with the others, out of the cold, but she was the one who knew where the cabin was, and she wouldn’t let them go without her.

“Besides,” she had said, whispering over the sounds of the others starting to unpack their wagons. “They need to see their leader strong, not hiding with the weakest ones.”

Jaime had wanted to argue, but he never won arguments with Cersei, and in the end he didn’t bother.

She’s right, anyway. They need some supplies, and she needs to exert her authority over the gang after the weeks they’ve had. Especially with new folk like Euron fucking Greyjoy, who seems to think he’s her right-hand man just because she said she liked a few of his ideas and hasn’t yet gotten sick of his obsequious fawning.

It’s been snowing for days now without stop. Even Sandor, their best hunter, hasn’t been able to bring in more than a couple of rabbits. The Kettleblack brothers are dead, lost back at Storms End when Cersei botched a simple con job that she should've been able to pull in her sleep. Their money is lost too. Buried back there until the heat dies down enough that they can safely send someone after it.

And Jaime’s horse got killed, apparently. Not like it’s the most important thing, but he wasn’t even _involved_ in that job, and Honor didn’t do anything wrong. It still stings, especially since no one will tell him exactly what went wrong.

Cersei isn’t ready to talk about it, which means Jaime doesn’t ask the questions he wants to. She’s been short with him for _months_ now, and his being too late back from a debt collection job didn’t help. Not like he would have been able to stop Cersei going off the rails the way she did, but Cersei isn’t one for reason when it comes to that kind of thing. Jaime should’ve been there. Jaime wasn’t there. That made it Jaime’s fault.

And with Euron constantly wheedling her about her twin brother’s softness and his apparent reluctance to hurt people who ‘need hurting’, well. That isn’t helping much either. If Jaime wasn’t so godsdamned tired, he might be madder about that.

The only reason Cersei even brings Jaime along to the cabin is because he’s the best shot they’ve got, and she's expecting trouble; the cabin belongs to Renly Baratheon. Brother of the husband Cersei killed. Brother of the man who’s been hunting them across the countryside for years. Jaime doesn’t like the risk, but everyone they’ve got back at that camp is freezing slowly, and they’ll be dead soon if they don’t do something else. They need to keep up on this mountain at least a little while longer if they want to keep out of the way of the law, and they’ll lose more people if they keep up the pace the way they have been. Jaime may not _like _most of them, but in an odd way they’re still his family.

If it was Jaime’s plan, he’d do the whole thing different, but it isn’t. Cersei calls the shots, and Jaime follows, like he has since the moment he was born, if you believe the midwife who said he was born clinging to her heel with his right hand. Jaime does, because it makes him feel better about everything he’s done for his sister. _It’s fate_, he can say. _I have to_.

They find Renly dead in a cart outside the cabin, still not frozen over but dusted lightly with some snow, which means he hasn’t been dead long. There are men inside laughing, and the saddles on the horses tied up outside make them for Stannis’s men. It’s a celebration, then. Jaime covers the boy with a bit of canvas, because there’s no use trying to bury him with the ground frozen like it is, but he wants to do _something_.

Cersei hollers out for help and then sweet-talks the men into coming outside. Spinning some sob story about being lost in the snow. They allow themselves to be reeled in, leering at her beautiful face and the cleavage she so artfully tilts in their direction. Once they’re all outside, Jaime and Euron open fire. Euron hits a few, but it’s Jaime who picks most of them off. That’s what he’s for, Jaime. Shooting sharp and quick and killing quiet. Gregor roars from the stables and has beaten the three men out there into a pulpy, snow-covered slush by the time the other three head over. That kind of shit is what _Gregor’s_ for. That and a whole bunch of unpleasantness that Jaime tries to pretend isn’t happening while he turns his back and ignores Cersei’s whispered commands to the man they call The Mountain That Rides.

Gregor and Euron head into the cabin to start looting on Cersei’s command. Jaime rounds up the horses in the stables. They’re good animals, nervous and jumpy but friendly enough when he shushes them. Horses never like Gregor. They don’t much care for Cersei either until Jaime’s gentled them, because she doesn’t have the patience to approach them the way they like. Cersei can win over any person alive, but animals escape her entirely. With Jaime, it mostly seems like the opposite is true. He can turn on the surface charm with people as much as his twin sister can, but he can’t ever seem to make it stick. They figure him for rotten eventually. Especially the good ones.

Gregor stumbles around in the house grunting as Euron waxes with his typical overwrought attempts at grandiosity about blankets and candles and food. They’re like a comedy act playing to no one but the corpses gathering snow outside. Cersei certainly isn’t paying them any mind, standing where she is on the front porch.

Jaime ties up the horses out front and goes through the saddlebags and takes stock of the bedrolls tied on back. It’s more horses than they need, but it could be meat if they get desperate, and Jaime needs a new horse anyway. When he’s done, Cersei’s waiting for him on the porch, nudging a dead man onto his back so she can get a look at his face.

“Plenty of extra blankets,” he reports as he approaches. “Medicines, too. Moonshine and bandages, mostly. Some of that herbal shit. Maybe not enough to replace Pycelle's stock, but it’s something.”

“No Stannis,” Cersei reports, her voice grim. He nods.

“He probably got out as soon as the deed was done,” he says, and Cersei mutters agreement. “You should get inside, Cersei. It’s cold.”

She sneers at him for the hint of gentleness in his tone, and she swishes her skirts as she turns away, stomping inside to stand beside Euron, who doesn’t bother her with inconvenient things like his love and devotion. Jaime sighs and bends down to take a look at the dead man on the porch. He’s got the sharp suit and the stupid stag's head badge that mark him as a Baratheon. Private law enforcement. Chasing gangs like the Lannisters out of the wilderness and into more civilized territory. Westeros is getting too small to hold all of them. He sighs again, and he plucks the badge from the dead man's suit, and he flings it out into the yard, into the snow.

It’s warm in the cabin, and Cersei is standing by the fire, carefully watching the things that Euron chooses to pack. She’s chilled, he knows, but she won’t show it. She won’t thank him for pressing his gloves into her hands, either, so he doesn’t. Just longs for her quietly from across the room, the way he always does lately.

It’s been a month and a half since she touched him. He wishes he would stop keeping track, but he knows he won’t.

Gregor stomps over a patch of floor that sounds different, and then he shoves over the table and unveils a trap door. He looks to Cersei for approval and then pulls it open when she nods.

Immediately, with a cry of rage, a beast of a man bursts out, swinging a fire poker and catching Gregor straight in the face. Euron laughs.

Gregor isn’t a small man. Nor is Jaime, for that matter. The man might be bigger than Jaime, but he looks like a _toddler_ beside Gregor. And yet he holds his own, fighting Gregor off, dodging the worst of his blows, beating him around the tipped-over table until inevitably Gregor manages to catch him by the throat and slam him into the wall.

“Is that a _woman_?” Cersei asks, and then Jaime looks closer and sees that his sister is right. Euron laughs again, delighted. The hulking blonde creature _is _a woman. She glares at all of them, and her flat chest heaves with indignation and fury, but she has something of a woman’s shape beneath her baggy man’s clothing.

“She nearly had you, Gregor,” Euron says, which makes Gregor growl and push the woman harder against the wall. She shows no signs of discomfort. Only fury.

“Where is Stannis?” she demands.

“He isn’t here,” Cersei answers. “We aren’t with him.” She walks closer. Jaime told her not to wear skirts out into the storm, but she didn’t listen, and they’re sodden now as she moves forward. It somehow doesn’t make her any less graceful. Her hair is limp from melting snow, and her cheeks red with the cold. She looks beautiful in the glow from the lanterns around the room. The woman from the basement looks more hideous in comparison, and she seems to realize it, dropping her eyes to the floor to avoid looking at Cersei for too long. “What business do you have with Stannis? Why were they keeping you locked up down there?”

Cersei has a way of speaking to people, especially people she’s only just meeting. She can be so _soft_. The woman against the wall softens in return.

“Stannis chased his brother here. Renly never did anything wrong. Stannis just wanted him dead. He killed him and then left me for his men.”

“Have they hurt you?” Cersei asks. It’s a woman’s question, asked low, and Jaime tenses to wait for the answer. The blonde woman shakes her head.

“They tried,” she admits. “But I fought them off. They locked me downstairs because they wanted to wait for me to get _weak _first.”

Cersei smiles. Her eyes light up as she takes in the masculine form of the woman in front of her. Jaime copies his sister, as he used to do in everything. This girl isn’t a beauty, and she’s younger than he first thought. She’s enormous, taller than Jaime for sure. She has big shoulders, big arms, and thick legs. Her mouth is too wide for her face, and her teeth are too big. Her nose looks to be broken, and there’s dried blood down her chin. Now that she mentions it, he can see that her man’s shirt is torn halfway open, missing buttons. Her pants, too. Also a man’s. Also torn. Jaime thinks of Robert Baratheon. He thinks of Aerys. He swallows back hatred, and he chooses to relive the moments outside when he ended the lives of the men who tried to take what this girl wasn’t offering. Jaime is a man bathed in violence, but there are kinds of violence that he cannot abide.

He doesn’t look at the others. Gregor and Euron, pretending at sympathy. He doesn’t look at Cersei. Oh, Cersei loathes it, but she still keeps The Mountain around, and she still uses him for the fear he has earned from the people who know what he is.

Since he cannot look at any of them, he looks at her. This new woman. Her eyes meet his, and they are astonishing enough to distract from the rest of it: enormous and deep blue in color.

“You’re remarkable,” Cersei says, her admiration raw and open and covetous. Jaime already knows what she’s doing. They lost the Kettleblacks fleeing Storms End. They lost Pycelle, too, and Janos Slynt. They need more bodies, or the gang will surely fall. Bruisers like this woman will be welcome, especially if they have a personal reason to loathe Stannis the way Cersei does. What better person to pull into Cersei’s fold? Loyal. Devoted. _Hers._ “Would you come with us, if I asked you to? You might be happy to know that we’re on the run from Stannis, too.”

“He killed my husband,” the woman says. Cersei cannot hide the eyebrow that raises in surprise, and she looks over at Jaime. He stifles his own smile in his scarf. The woman notices. She flushes. An ugly, blotchy red across her cheeks. When she speaks, it’s hard and unforgiving. “You knew him, I take it. Since you seem…aware. Of his tastes.”

“Oh, so you knew,” Cersei says with a sweet smile and an apparent relief. “Gregor, please. Let the girl go.” He does, reluctantly, and the girl rubs at her throat. “I was acquainted with Renly, yes, and his tastes. I knew him when I was married to his brother.”

The girl blanches, and she looks at Cersei. After a beat, her eyes go to Jaime.

“The Lannisters,” she whispers.

“I’m so pleased you’ve heard of us,” Cersei says.

* * *

There has never been anything normal about Cersei and Jaime Lannister. Or, if there was, it was burned out of them long ago. Their father was a cruelly cold man, so focused on rising in importance in the governing body of Westeros that he ignored his lonely children until he realized that two of them were good for his reputation. For Jaime, who had trouble reading and no head for politics, there would be strength and valor and honor. For beautiful Cersei, well, plenty of political alliances were sealed with marriages. Not quite the selling of brides of olden days, but close enough to it.

Cersei longed to be Jaime, to be taught to fight and defend and earn glory for herself on some battlefield. He never said it aloud, but there were times when Jaime longed to be Cersei. Cared for softly instead of expected to toughen up and be hard and cruel.

Now that he’s older, Jaime knows why Cersei kissed him the first time. Why she wanted him with that hunger. It was desire, yes, but it was possession, too. They were mirrors of each other, and Cersei wanted to _be_ him. She wanted to _have_ him. Own him. She wanted to absorb him into her so that he would never leave. He loved her. He loved her. He loved her. There was nothing else but Cersei.

Years later, and he understands, but he didn’t, then. He was blinded by his love for her, which grew into a needful lust much like hers as they aged. Every time he stopped to think, he would wonder what they were doing. If they were caught, they would be killed, or at the very least driven out of polite society. Their father would have him shipped off to war somewhere, send him right to the frontlines where he could die with dignity and scrub a little of the stain off his honor. Cersei would be married hastily to whatever wealthy boor would take her. It was so much risk, but he never wanted to stop, and she never would have let him even if he did.

Her marriage to Robert Baratheon was an unpleasant surprise to them both, but Cersei was unapologetic when she turned Jaime away the first time. She had come to terms with her lot in life as she got older. If marriage and wifedom were what she was expected to do, then that was what she _would_ do, and she would do it well enough to finally get the approval from their father that she had always craved.

She tried, for a little while, to be the wife that Robert wanted, and that meant staying away from Jaime. It was like an alcoholic trying to stop drinking cold turkey. Which is funny because her absence turned him into their wine-soaked little brother, Tyrion. Constantly swallowing back whiskey in saloons to dull the ache of missing her.

Cersei was married for three years. Three poisonous years, only seeing her and fucking her every few months when she’d show up to his rented rooms, dressed like a maid or a bathgirl, her ample breasts spilling out of some lowcut dress. She’d be gone moments after they were done, never allowing him the softness of _after_, which had always been his favorite part. It was just fucking, and it was the only thing he could get, and so he gave her all he had. He knew it wouldn’t be enough. No matter how much he gave her, it wouldn’t be enough. It wasn’t enough for him, either.

After three years, she showed up at his rooms in town with a bag stuffed with clothing. Her hair was wild, unbraided. She was dressed in a soft silk nightgown underneath a giant coat and scarf. She practically ripped the scarf off from around her neck, and she threw open the coat and let it drop to the floor. Cersei was always so careful with her things. She hated Jaime’s passion when he would rip and tear and dirty. But she was careless, then.

“Fuck me,” she begged him. “I need you.”

He did, though his attention kept being pulled from his ardor by his anger, by the bruises on her thighs and her stomach.

“What did he do?” he asked, trying to be gentle with her damaged skin, but she growled at him and kissed him harder and whispered _shut up shut up shut up_ against his ear as she rode him until he forgot everything but Cersei.

“He’s dead,” she said, after. Her eyes glittered with promise. She laughed for the first time since they were children. “He’s dead, Jaime. He’s dead. I killed him myself. I bit it off, Jaime. I bit it off, and I cut his throat.”

Jaime stared at his sister. She was savage and terrifying and beautiful.

“He tried to force you,” he guessed, and she smiled wider.

“I told him what would happen if he tried,” she purred, and she stood up. Her nightgown was still on. She found her smallclothes and stepped into them. “We’re running. Father has given me some money. I’ve got a wedding ring for you, and you need to shave that ridiculous beard. We’re posing as man and wife until we get out of the city. We’re taking the train to Riverrun.”

* * *

Six years on, and her dead husband’s brother is still chasing them across Westeros.

It’s not just familial fealty – obviously, considering what he did to his youngest brother. Stannis would be chasing them even if Robert hadn’t been his kin, because the Lannister Gang has made a bloody name for itself, and Stannis’s trade is in cleaning up after people like them.

They’d just been content to run, at first. Hiding and fucking whenever they wanted. Spending weeks in rented rooms and then moving on once people started asking questions. But it didn’t satisfy Cersei for long. She rejected the idea of going somewhere else – Dorne or Essos or fucking Braavos. _Wherever _they could be together – and she started looking for a purpose.

She found that purpose after she heard the news bulletin: their father was dead.

Killed by their little brother.

Neither of them had cared for their father very much, but Cersei had always _hated_ Tyrion, so she demanded that they do something ‘fun’ to mourn, and that meant robbing a train, apparently. The rest was down to reputation and the unique power of a woman in charge of a gang, especially a woman who was rumored to have bitten off her husband’s cock.

There are other gangs. The Bloody Mummers are the worst, and there’s Lady Stoneheart and the Brotherhood, and there are the Wildlings and the Sand Snakes. The Lannisters have a reputation of honor, or at least a twisted version of it, and Jaime knows that’s why Renly’s widow agrees to join them. She looks at _him_ like he’s the no-honor piece of shit he is, but she looks at Cersei with eyes that gleam, and it makes Jaime want to laugh even though he understands it. Poor girl. Cersei will eat her alive.


	2. Chapter 2

The widow’s name is Brienne, and she’s from a little island off the coast. _Tarth_. Jaime remembers seeing pictures of it in a book he used to show Tyrion before Tyrion started reading. It had belonged to their mother, who always liked to read about faraway places. Tarth was real pretty in the pictures, like something _made _to be painted, and he wonders why Brienne would leave a place like that.

For Renly, he supposes, and it makes him pity Brienne even though he knows she would probably hate that.

Of the Baratheon brothers, Renly was the best, so he can’t begrudge her for falling in love with the man. He can’t even blame her for marrying him even though she knew he couldn’t want her. Maybe it felt like an act of love, helping him keep hidden the fact that a man was what he wanted. There was honor in it, he thinks. It reminds him of himself in ways he’s not totally comfortable touching.

Cersei adores the girl. As a curiosity, mostly, but Jaime knows the hunger in her gaze for what it is. She wanted so badly to learn the same things Jaime learned as they grew up. She used to beg him to teach her to shoot and how to throw a punch. He’s taught her plenty in the years since they ran away from their lives and forged a new legacy for their name, but there will always be something soft and feminine about Cersei. She turns it into a weapon better than any woman he’s ever known, but he knows that Brienne’s form and strength and grace are all things she will covet even as she can’t help but sneer at the poor girl’s ugliness.

He thinks maybe the ugliness is part of why Cersei likes Brienne so much. She’s careful of the other women in the gang, always watching Jaime if he tries to be friendly with any of them aside from old Olenna Tyrell (who flirts with him more horribly than any of the younger ones, to be sure, but Cersei doesn’t seem to mind that). But with Brienne looking like she does, Cersei will know that she doesn’t have to worry. Like the years of Jaime being with no one but her weren’t enough to tell her. She needs more tangible proof than that.

Never mind that she’s barely interested in Jaime at all anymore: Cersei has never been very good at sharing.

* * *

Brienne can ride like any man. She can fight better than almost any man, too. Gregor Clegane and his brother Sandor have been with the gang almost as long as the gang has existed, and neither of them have ever been impressed by anyone else, but Jaime catches them watching her with open fascination. It might be the only thing the two of them have ever agreed on. Quiet, terrifying Ilyn Payne doesn’t show much by way of emotion, but in those early weeks when he watches her shoot and ride with the rest of them, he’s always grinning at her. Even Euron, who has never met a woman he couldn’t insult just by virtue of being in their presence, sings her praises, constantly reminding his nephew Theon that “he should grow a pair like the one Tarth has on her,” which always makes the other men laugh and makes Brienne scowl.

It makes them all like her more, the fact that she plainly finds them so distasteful. They laugh and cheer when she curls her lip at them, good natured and amused by the outlaw woman who insists on keeping to some kind of internal code. She keeps away from them as best as she can, spending more time with the women, though she seems just as uncomfortable around them, with all their talk of whoring and swindling men out of gold. Olenna thinks she’s fascinating, and she takes care of Brienne like she’s her own child. Her granddaughter, pretty Margaery, the best thief they have, is quite taken with her too. Jaime isn’t ever sure what those two are up to, but after a few weeks of assuming they’re fucking with Brienne, he has to concede that they just seem to like the stubborn, quiet girl. Taena, one of their cons, is sharper, but even her most savage statements are punctuated with something softer, and she clearly admires Brienne’s size and sturdiness in the same covetous way Cersei does. Ellaria Sand openly flirts with her, like she’s in an open competition with herself to see how quickly she can make Brienne blush.

And pretty, sweet, sad Jeyne Poole. She likes Brienne better than anyone. No one knows quite what she has suffered at the hands of men, but she blossoms with Brienne around, knowing that Brienne could protect her from any of them.

The one most taken with her, though, is little Podrick Payne. Some relation of Ilyn’s who showed up one day with a letter from his ailing mother, begging Ilyn to take him in. Ilyn was less equipped than anyone to take care of an orphan boy, but Cersei was glad to take him in. Podrick was exactly the sort of person she wanted: a grateful child, folded into her arms. Those would be the most loyal, she said. He would grow up knowing no other home.

Pod is always a shadow around camp, darting around to be helpful to whoever needs him, but he becomes Brienne’s constant companion once she settles in. He’s always offering to help her polish her guns, fetching water or dinner or a coat if it’s cold. The other men laugh about it, but Jaime can’t join them, because he knows that Pod just wants to help. It reminds him of himself as a child, caring for his twin and the little brother he hasn’t seen in years. He had always been so sure that he needed to be _of use_. If they didn’t think they needed him, they wouldn’t want him.

Brienne has a healthy disdain of all the men, thinking herself better than them, but her disdain for Jaime is strongest. She must have heard about Aerys, then. Like everyone else in Westeros, she has opinions about why he killed the head of the prominent Targaryen family. Like everyone else, she assumes the worst, and she doesn’t bother to ask.

Even Cersei never bothered to ask.

Brienne has been fooled easily by Cersei. Jaime can tell within a few days that his sister has bought herself another acolyte. A few soft words and gentle kindnesses. That’s all it takes. Cersei knows exactly how to talk to people to get them frothing at the mouth to die for her.

It’s only sometimes that Jaime admits to himself that he’s halfway convinced he isn’t the exception he thought he was.

* * *

Brienne mourns for her husband, because whether or not they were a true match, she still loved Renly deeply. Cersei asks Jaime and Sandor to distract her with work, because Brienne’s apparently the sort who likes to be useful, too. They take her with them on small errands. Hunting with Sandor. A scouting trip down out of the mountains with Jaime. She holds her own and takes down a massive stag on her own, which makes the men laugh and cheer and makes Olenna proclaim that it’s a good omen. Once the snows start to melt a bit, Jaime takes Brienne and Ilyn and Pod and finds a good place for a camp, just outside some dinky southern town. It meets Cersei’s approval, and they leave the mining camp behind for good.

The widow never once complains. She does what’s asked of her. She argues if she thinks the wrong move is being made, but she’ll still _do _it if it’s phrased like an order. Her grief makes her pliant in the same way her deep anger makes her strong. Cersei is in raptures, constantly praising her to her face and to the others. Euron, the ass-kissing little fuck, does the same.

Brienne seems like the sort who maybe never had that before. Never had people treating her size and her strength like it’s the wonder that it is. Jaime gets in a few compliments of his own, especially when she’s such a help with moving shit around camp, and she always gives him this startled little look. Like she wants to ask: _me_?

* * *

Their first real job with Brienne comes a few nights after they’ve settled down in the new camp. There’s a wagon coming through, money bound for The Twins, being driven by a few Frey men. The Freys are always easy marks, and this will be no exception. Cersei assigns Jaime to head the operation. Ilyn and Euron and Brienne will be his team.

The night before the job, Cersei sneaks into his tent. It’s a brush of silk skirts and a sudden presence in his cot, and she pulls and prods him until he’s on top of her, sleepily untying her laces, muscle memory and _want_ overriding his exhaustion.

“Brienne will ride out with you tomorrow,” Cersei pants beneath him. “Make sure she comes back. I have plans for her.”

He grunts in acknowledgement and fumbles beneath her full skirts until he can find her wet and waiting for him. She always is. He smiles against her mouth when she arches up to chase his touch. She hasn’t visited his tent since the first night they set up. The few nights he’s actually in camp and not running some kind of errand and sleeping out under the stars, he’s always primed and ready for her, waiting, but she disappoints him more often than not. And if he ever seeks her out, he’ll get an annoyed glare and a month of frozen silence, so he knows better than to do that.

They call Sandor _The Hound_, but Jaime knows he deserves the name more. He’s his sister’s pet, relying entirely on her pleasure. He fucks her, kisses her everywhere she lets him, and all the while she allows him control. But that control is gone the moment he spends inside her.

She leaves when they’re done without so much as a kiss, and then he’s alone.

* * *

He knows he and Cersei were silent the night before, because they always are, but still he feels like he can sense a new kind of disapproval in Brienne as she rides behind him. He used to bitterly fear discovery, because he knew it would mean trial and probably execution, but the hangmen are never far behind him these days, so he doesn’t fear the way he used to. Still, Brienne’s disdain makes his shoulders tight with tension. As he leads the charge over the hills, headed for the intercept point, he can feel her judgement at his back.

One of the Frey boys is driving the wagon. They’re all weak-willed generally, but their fear of their grandfather makes them give a half-hearted effort to outrun the thieves. Jaime and Brienne are the first to catch up. Brienne’s eyes are big and blue over the bandana he told her to pull over her face, and she looks at Jaime with reproach when he sticks his gun in the kid’s face and orders him off the wagon.

When they’re done, Jaime hangs back and makes sure he catches her eye.

“You know what you’re getting into now,” he says. He tries not to be harsh. Tries to sound like his sister, all cloying falseness. He was good at it when he was younger, but that was before Aerys made him bitter. And years of this have drained him dry of anything but brittle rage.

“I already knew,” she says. Her voice is clear and low, but he hears a waver in it.

“It isn’t what you’re used to,” he says.

“I knew who you were,” she replies. “And I’m still here. I aim to kill Stannis.”

“And then?” he asks. She doesn’t answer. She looks ahead, watches the trail.

“I don’t know yet,” she finally says.

“There’ll be a place for you here even after you kill Stannis.” He looks at her when he says it, and he sees that she is surprised by the sentiment. Her jaw clenches. Her eyes get even larger. Like most of the people in their gang, she probably hasn’t felt like she fit pretty much anywhere. The difference is that those other degenerates have deserved the shunning for one reason or another. This girl, she’s just big and homely. She hasn’t earned this. “I know it might not be what you want, but Cersei…she wants you around. And if you know us, then you know we don’t take jobs that’ll get innocent people hurt.”

Not always, anyway. Not often. Cersei likes their gang to stand apart. A thieves’ code of a kind. She is so disillusioned with men taking what they want. She takes a savage pleasure in taking things back from the ones who don’t deserve what they have.

And when she requires the darker deeds done against people who don’t deserve them, she sends her pets. Clegane. Payne. Jaime.

Not Brienne. He feels a sudden certainty, like determination. Not ever Brienne. She won’t be tainted. She won’t _let_ herself be tainted, he knows that, but his sister’s words have corrupted many men. He won’t let Brienne suffer the same. For the part of him that’s left that still believes in honor, if nothing else.

* * *

Brienne is a good shot. Almost as good as him. Perhaps better if he isn’t feeling prickly and annoyed about it. She has good eyes, which is the first thing he teases her about, when they’re casing a gang hideout.

“Of course you can see better than me,” he says. “Your eyes are twice the size of mine, I think.”

She scowls at him like she does whenever someone mentions her looks, and he laughs at her expression. And it isn’t that he gets any less rude to her, really, but she learns to read the rudeness for the gentle teasing it is, and within a few weeks she’s firing back at him. Her insults are clumsy and awful, and he always laughs more at her delivery than anything else, but he likes the way she always looks quietly pleased with herself when she’s made someone else chuckle and wolf-whistle if they overhear.

She still disdains most of the men at camp, and she is still warily worshipful of Cersei, who makes sure to soften Brienne with stories of Stannis from back when she was married to Robert. Horrible Stannis. Honorless Stannis. Never mind that his damned code of honor is his biggest problem: Brienne needs to be enraged by him. She needs to think he is scum. It keeps her here, where Cersei needs her. These Lannisters in this gang, they’re bad enough, but they’re not nearly as bad as Stannis, so she’ll stay.

As the weeks pass, he doesn’t mind so much, in a very selfish way. He likes Brienne, and she’s a good rider to have at his back, and she’s good company. She reminds him a bit of himself when he was younger and still fool enough to think honor mattered. She reminds him of Tyrion, too. Always bracing for the worst the world has to offer. He likes Cersei’s lies because he doesn’t want Brienne to leave.

* * *

He isn’t sure how it takes Cersei so long to see it. His sister has a habit of seeing only what she wants to see, and so maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she can’t fathom it, so she doesn’t bother to look for it.

Jaime begins to listen to Brienne.

He was so concerned in the beginning about their gang corrupting her that he never considered that he might be the one corrupted. Why _would_ he worry? He has been surviving in this shithole world far longer than her, and he knows the depths men will sink to, and he understands people cannot be trusted. People have never stopped ensuring he remembers that. Aerys, most of all: the only person he’s ever killed that wasn’t at the behest of his sister. If anyone was going to corrupt anyone, it would be him corrupting her.

But he hears her voice in odd moments. When he’s riding with Sandor and they’re meant to be intimidating a family into paying back a debt, and he sees the hovel they live in and can imagine the look Brienne would give him if she knew he was doing this. He takes their debt out of his own stash and tells Sandor he did the job. Or when he’s knocked off his horse by a Wildling kid and manages to get the upper hand and sees that it’s just a boy. Barely old enough to grow the wispy moustache on his face. Before Brienne, he would have just killed the kid anyway, but he hogties him instead, and keeps him for a hostage until they pass a Wildling camp on their way back, and then leaves him tied up on the side of the road.

She’s not usually around when he makes these decisions, but it’s worse when she is. He can feel her eyes on him, judging him, and even when he makes the right choice and she smiles at him after, that feeling of judgement remains. He can see the way her opinion of him changes, and he hates it. He wants to tell her. Remind her that he’s still the same scumbag she’s heard tales of for years. A few good deeds don’t erase a man’s past. And yet he is _desperate _for her to see that he _isn’t _that man. Hasn’t been for a while. Maybe never truly was.

It’s a balance he can’t quite figure out, and he knows it’s confusing for the poor girl when one minute he’s reaching out and acting friendly and the next he’s cold and distant.

* * *

Cersei comes into his tent one night when Brienne’s there. There’s a map spread out on the table between them, and Brienne is scowling at him bitterly as he insists his route through the swamps is the best one.

“That’s Silent Sister territory,” she’s arguing, which makes him laugh hard at her. He opens his mouth to tease her about being superstitious, and then he sees Cersei watching them. Brienne jumps up to greet her, bowing in a way he knows Cersei probably likes.

“Brienne, you _sweet_ girl,” Cersei says, going to her and reaching up to fix a lock of hair that has tumbled out from behind the brim of Brienne’s wide hat. “You look exhausted. Why don’t you get some rest? I have warned my brother not to work you too hard, but he never likes to listen to me.”

Jaime can see the tension in her spine and in her eyes as she looks at Brienne. There is nothing warning in her expression, because she doesn’t blame Brienne for anything yet. The only warning is for him. He’s the one who understands Cersei’s too-careful words.

“I want to be useful,” Brienne says, quietly, like she’s afraid to speak louder. Jaime feels a rush of sympathy for her large, awkward frame. Her attempts to be quiet and submissive look utterly ridiculous on her, and yet around women like Cersei and Olenna, that’s her default. She is so self-defeating with her insistence that she knows nothing of a woman’s art. She snaps at the men and tells them off. She’s developed quite a mouth after weeks of dealing with people like Sandor Clegane, who doesn’t consider it a real sentence if it doesn’t contain at least one _fuck_. But around the women, she shrinks herself, like she’s trying to avoid blows. 

Cersei’s expression is all pity, though Jaime knows she cannot abide weakness in a woman.

“You are always of use,” Cersei says. “I promise you, I have no patience for those who aren’t. But _you_.” She looks Brienne over approvingly, and Brienne looks back with a kind of yearning on her expression that makes Jaime have to look away again, because if he thinks too long about how Cersei’s manipulating this poor creature, he might grow a conscience. It’s not generally enough to get him to actually _do_ something, but it’ll be enough to make him unhappy for a while, and he would much rather avoid that. “In the world I which my brother and I grew up, you would be set aside and shoved into an uncomfortable box not nearly big enough to hold you. You would be told to be quiet, and say only pretty words, and do your best to charm a man into marrying you, because the people back there are convinced that those charms are a woman’s only worth, and without them you are nothing. I am not those people, Brienne. Everyone here knows exactly how much you do for all of us, and we value you. You haven’t been with us for very long, but you have already made an impression. Isn’t that right, Jaime?”

It’s impossible to tell if his sister means anything sinister by the look she gives him. Knowing and sly like that. _Has_ she noticed Jaime’s recent reluctance to do anything totally abhorrent? Has she noticed the way he hesitates under Brienne’s damning gazes? Worse: has someone _told _her?

Euron would. Euron already thinks Jaime’s soft because he’s not a fucking monster, and he’s been trying to get between Cersei and Jaime since he joined.

“Of course you’ve made an impression,” he says to Brienne. “The men all respect you, and the women love you. We all rely on you, Brienne.”

That seems to satisfy his sister, and she turns and takes Brienne’s elbow gently, leading her from the tent with a few more murmurs of comfort. Jaime stands and watches them go, and he feels a disquiet lingering somewhere within him. Cersei used to be the only light in his world, but lately Brienne has cast something warm across his life. Not quite the roiling brightness that Cersei’s presence always brings him. Something softer but no less real.

After, Cersei shoves him down onto his cot, and she covers his mouth to keep him quiet, and she fucks him furiously. Possessively. It’s almost painful in its pleasure. Too sharp, without any of the gentleness he wishes he could tell her he wants. She marks him, biting into the flesh of his shoulder.

No, she might not notice as much as she should, but she notices something, his sister. And she doesn’t like what she sees.

* * *

She doesn’t like it several days later when she sees Brienne pushing a bowl of stew into Jaime’s hands, scolding him for not taking better care of himself. She doesn’t like it another night when she sees Brienne draping a blanket over Jaime’s shoulders when she sees that he’s gotten a little cold on watch. She doesn’t like it when Jaime’s injured after a run-in with some of Stannis’s men a little while after they move their camp down from the mountains, and Brienne hauls him back in and then sits him down by the fire and treats his wounds with a gentleness that has Jaime leaning into her touch despite himself, despite the fact that he knows he should be more careful.

* * *

“I found him,” Cersei says.

She stands just inside the flap of Jaime’s tent. Brienne is a few steps behind her, looking less awkward than usual in the new clothes that Cersei had made for her in town. They’re womanly in their way, fitted around her waist and made from softer material than the rough denim she’s been wearing. The shirt is a startling blue with pretty white lions dancing along the collar, and he feels a pang of something like sadness to see her in it. She doesn’t seem a woman used to pretty gifts, and whatever Cersei gives her comes with strings attached, and she has no idea.

“You found who?” he asks, sitting up, shaking off the last dregs of sleep. It’s still barely sundown, so he hasn’t been asleep for long. He bites back his annoyance with his sister; surely she can see that she’s running him ragged. Brienne certainly does.

“Tyrion,” Cersei says, and Jaime freezes.

He stares at Cersei. She stares back, her chin tipped slightly up, the way it gets when she thinks that someone is going to defy her.

And, gods, but he _wants to_. Tyrion has kept himself safe in the years since he killed their father. Whoever was hiding him, they were doing a hell of a job of it. But they were saving Jaime as much as they were saving Tyrion, because Cersei was always going to send _him _to finish the job, knowing very well that it would kill Jaime to do it.

He swallows.

“Where?” he asks.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heads up: this is the chapter with the threats of rape/non-con. It's in the very last segment. The actual threats are very vaguely written, though a character does explain what their intentions are going to be.

Brienne rides silently beside him, and Jaime knows that this is another punishment from his sister. She wants Brienne to understand exactly who Jaime is. She prefers Jaime when he’s put away safely for whenever she needs him, and Brienne has introduced a variable that she cannot stomach.

Cersei _likes _that Jaime quietly loathes most of the men of their gang even as he considers them family. She likes that he stays well away from most of the women. Bringing Brienne in and making Jaime look after her was _her _idea, but of course now it’s a bad thing, now that he’s getting something out of it, some companionship that she isn’t interested in giving to him.

She wants to make Brienne watch as Jaime kills his beloved little brother, and she wants Brienne to understand: whatever Cersei wants, Cersei gets. No matter how much Jaime cares about another person, if Cersei decides that she doesn’t want them breathing, Jaime will see to it that they stop. It’s a threat and a reminder and an insurance against any deeper forming attachment, all rolled up in one.

She wants Brienne to hate him. Maybe she wants Brienne to _fear _him.

Jaime’s stomach feels tied up tight in a thousand knots, and Brienne keeps looking at him as they ride.

“Who’s Tyrion?” she asks, and he pretends he didn’t hear her.

* * *

The hotel is a nice one, in the middle of the town. Dingy little backwater town, though, so Tyrion was being smart, keeping out of the bigger cities where Cersei might have some friends. It’s just bad luck that someone spotted him.

“What are we here to do?” Brienne asks as they hitch their horses to a storefront down the street a bit. Jaime peels his eyes away from the front of the hotel and looks at her. Her eyes are her best feature, and they burn him now with their trust in him.

_Don’t you understand_? He wants to ask her. _Can’t you see what she’s doing? _

But of course she can’t. Brienne is _good_, and she has been bought by all of Cersei’s careful kindnesses. Why _would _she suspect cruelty behind Cersei’s motivations? She won’t unless he tells her, and even then she might not believe him.

“You should stay here,” he says.

“Cersei told me to stick with you.”

“I don’t want you following me,” he tries, snapping at her, hoping she’ll drop it. But she squares up, going tall enough to loom over him.

“It isn’t up to you,” she says. Her blue eyes flash. “Who’s Tyrion?”

Jaime scowls at her. A million cruel things bubble up inside him, like a winning hand of cards. Fanned out inside his mind. He only needs to pick _one_. Say something terrible enough to make her get on that horse and ride out without him, no matter what Cersei told her to do.

“My brother,” he says, answering her instead.

She stares at him.

“Your brother,” she says.

“Tyrion. My little brother.”

He says it again. _My little brother_. He remembers the book spread out on the pillow between them. Tarth blue and green and pretty on the page. Tyrion’s chubby little hand turning the pages reverently because Jaime told him _this used to be mama’s book_, and Tyrion worshiped every sign he could find that their mother had existed before his birth took her away.

“Your brother,” Brienne repeats, and her voice breaks a little in the middle. “What did he do? Why does Cersei want to kill him?”

_What did he do_? Jaime laughs, but it comes out strangled and sob-like, even though he hasn’t cried in front of another person in _years_. He looks away before he can fully take in the startled reproach in her eyes. She’s not any more equipped to deal with weeping than he is, he reckons. He swallows down the lump in his throat, controls himself.

“He didn’t _do_ anything,” he finally says, facing away from her, eyes on the hotel, hoping to see some other dwarf. Hoping someone was wrong when they told Cersei Tyrion was here. “He killed our father, but our father was a…was a fucking monster.” The words hissed out, whispered, as if Cersei might somehow be lurking nearby and overhear. “He deserved it, for the way he treated Tyrion. He deserved it for the way he treated _us_, but Cersei never…Cersei has _always _hated Tyrion, and she…”

He trails off, because Brienne has started squeezing his shoulder. That spot where it meets the neck, where his muscles are always the most tense. Her thumb moves a bit, stroking the collar of his shirt unconsciously. He bites his lips together and is glad that she’s standing behind him, because he feels every muscle in his body start to relax at the touch. There is something so _solid _about Brienne in this moment. A steady weight that he could lean on, if only he would allow himself to admit he needs it.

“Are you going to do it?” she asks. Her voice is steady. It’s sure. It _infuriates _him, because she should believe that he’s going to. She should understand that he is Cersei’s creature, that he’s Cersei’s _dog_, and that he will always do what Cersei wants him to.

But…

“I can’t,” he says, and he knows it for the truth, and Brienne’s fingers press harder through his shirt, the heat of them potent, the pressure and strength of her hand keeping him tethered.

“Why would she ask you to?” she asks.

“You know why.”

“I don’t.”

He sighs, and he turns to face her.

“Maybe you don’t,” he admits. “I should share the blame for that. I’ve let her blind you.”

“I’m not as blind as you think. But I still don’t understand.”

“I hope you never do,” Jaime says honestly, before he jerks his head towards the hotel. She hesitates, but she nods, and she follows.

* * *

“Ah,” Tyrion says when he opens the door to his room and finds Jaime and Brienne standing in the hall. “She’s found me, then.”

“I’m afraid so,” Jaime says, but he cannot help but smile. He goes down to one knee, and he hugs his brother for the first time in years.

“Look at you. Look at your _hair_,” Tyrion says, laughing, tugging on a strand of it, long and not quite as golden as it used to be. “There’s _gray _in it! You’re getting old.”

“Shut up,” Jaime says. He looks up at Brienne, who has her hand on her pistol and a wary look in her eyes. Jaime wonders at the amount of trust he has in her. He knows she believes in Cersei. She knows what Cersei ordered him to do. He should think, should at least pause to imagine, that Brienne might carry out the orders even if Jaime can’t.

He doesn’t for a second think she will.

“Good Lord, you’re a woman,” Tyrion says with audible excitement. “Hello, I’m Tyrion.”

“_Another_ woman?” comes a sly, accented voice from within the room. Jaime laughs when a lithe, beautiful brunette stands up from the bed, completely nude. Brienne flushes redder than Jaime’s ever seen, and she whirls around to face the hallway.

“Brienne’s a bit shy,” Jaime says.

“I am _not_,” she hisses. “I’m just…” Maybe realizing how ridiculous she looks, she spins back around and stares resolutely down at Tyrion’s eyes, refusing to raise them to look at the woman who is now standing just behind him. “I’m Brienne.”

“We picked her up a few months back. Renly’s widow,” Jaime says with a pointedness that makes Tyrion’s face do that scrunching thing it does when he tries desperately not to laugh. Jaime missed him so much.

“Ah, well I’m sorry for your loss,” he manages to say. Brienne glares between them.

“I’m Shae,” says the naked woman. She looks at Brienne with a frank appreciation that isn’t sexual but isn’t quite _not _sexual. “You’re enormous. Look at you. You’d fetch quite a price.”

“A _price_?” Brienne asks. Jaime laughs again. He can’t seem to help it. Everything about this moment is delightful.

“Shae is a prostitute, sweet Brienne,” Tyrion says.

“I’m not a prostitute anymore,” Shae insists, slapping him lightly on the shoulder. She sweeps her arm aside, as poised as any society lady, still very much naked. “Would you two like to come in?”

* * *

But there isn’t much time for their reunion, and Tyrion seems to know it just as easily as he knew that Jaime wouldn’t hurt him. It sours everything a bit, because Jaime wants to prove him wrong. _I’ll help you_, he should say. _I’ll protect you. I’ll go with you._ But he won’t, and Tyrion knows it, and it _hurts_.

“Pack your things, Shae,” Tyrion says, already halfway through shoving his clothes into his suitcase. “We should be on the road as soon as we can. Once you’re dressed, head down to get Bronn. I’ll meet you on the edge of town. North, I think.”

“Are we in trouble?” Shae asks.

“My sister sent him,” Tyrion answers, his voice pitched low, and Shae looks at Jaime.

“Oh,” she says. There’s hate in her eyes. “And is he going to kill you, my lion?”

“No,” Tyrion says. “But we can’t stay.”

Jaime stares at the ground, and out the window, and at the lions dancing on the collar of Brienne’s shirt, but he cannot look at Tyrion until Shae is gone, lugging a bag along with her.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Yes, of course you are,” Tyrion sighs impatiently. Brienne says nothing.

They help Tyrion load his things onto his horse. Jaime helps him mount it. Tyrion bends down and hugs him fiercely.

“Don’t tell me where you’re going,” Jaime says, and Tyrion sighs with audible disappointment as the proprietor of the hotel – a bald man dressed in luxurious silks – hands him a wad of cash and then disappears back inside.

“One of these days, Jaime, you’re going to break away from our dear sister, and you’re going to need someone to help you. When that day comes, you come here, and you ask my business partner Varys where I am. He’ll tell you.”

“Cersei can’t know that,” Jaime says, and Tyrion tilts his head in acknowledgement, settling his hat on his head.

“So don’t tell her,” he says, a challenge more than it is a plea. He gives Brienne a nod. “Ma’am.”

Brienne arches an eyebrow in return, and she and Jaime watch as Tyrion rides off, kicking up dust. Fleeing from his sister and from the brother who could break away enough to warn him but not enough to go with him.

“You did the right thing,” Brienne says.

“I know I did,” Jaime says, but it wasn’t right _enough_.

* * *

They shouldn’t have stopped to get something to drink, but Jaime had insisted. He felt a low panic at the thought of going back to Cersei, having to tell her that he’d failed. Brienne had already promised not to tell her the truth of what happened, and Jaime trusts her to keep her promises, but the thought of lying to Cersei still makes him itchy. If they can put it off one more night, he argued to her, he might feel better about it. A few drinks, a night sleeping out under the stars, it’s exactly what he needs.

Except then they’re leaving the saloon, and Brienne is hanging onto his arm, keeping him standing, stone sober and irritated by his drunkenness, and they’re heading towards their horses. And then there are people everywhere, surrounding them. Wearing hoods and long robes, most of them, and Jaime’s reeling and confused, trying to figure out who they belong to, and then the woman in front pulls back her hood and reveals the unforgettable face of Catelyn Stark.

Lady Stoneheart, they call her now.

“Shit,” he says. “Brienne, go.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Brienne’s plainly hurt by the order, her free hand on the pistol at her hip.

“She has nothing to do with this,” Jaime insists. Catelyn’s dead eyes roam Brienne’s outfit. The bandana, the belt. The beautiful new shirt that _screams _Cersei.

“She’s one of you,” Catelyn says.

Her voice is harsher than it used to be, back when she was just the pretty wife of a farmer who owed Cersei money. Jaime had ridden up and demanded payment, and when Ned Stark was too proud to give it to him – despite being the one who took out that ridiculous loan in the first place – Jaime had smacked him around. No more than he usually did for people who didn’t honor Lannister debts, but no one told him the man was in the end stages of an illness that went and killed him hours after Jaime left.

The last time he saw Catelyn, she’d ridden into camp, trembling with fury, her son on the horse behind her. She had flung a bag of gold at him. It struck him in the chest and burst open, raining pieces down in the dirt.

“Here’s your _gold_,” she spat. “You should _pray_ I never see your face again.”

Most women in her position would try and find another husband. Maybe move to the city and get a job to support her son. Not Catelyn Stark. Makes sense she’d form her own sort of gang. He’d heard of them vaguely, but he thought they were miles north. Didn’t expect to see Lady Stoneheart so far south. Maybe she came looking for _him_.

“She’s not one of us,” he says. “Cersei’s grooming her. Using her. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

Catelyn looks at Brienne’s hand, still wrapped around Jaime’s arm, and she smiles a little.

“It’s good to see you afraid,” she says, stepping forward, her eyes boring into his. “I wonder if it’s a tenth of what I felt when I saw you beating my husband into the dirt. I wonder if it’s a tenth of what Aerys felt when you shot him in the back.”

Jaime snarls at her, and Catelyn smiles wider. It reaches her eyes, giving them a savage, feral gleam. Her son stands over her shoulder, emotionless. Brienne holds Jaime’s arm tighter.

* * *

By the time they’re handed over to the Bloody Mummers, hours later, Brienne’s face is dripping in red from a gash on her cheek, and Jaime’s head is half beaten in. Brienne fought twice as well as he did, but neither of them fought well enough to keep the Brotherhood from giving them to the Mummers, nor to keep the Mummers from locking them in the root cellar of an old farmhouse. They aren’t chained up – not yet – but the door is too sturdy to break through, and there’s nothing down here that can help them.

“Why wouldn’t she just kill you?” Brienne asks, hours later, once they’ve been left on their own long enough that they’ve tried everything to break out. Her face is swelling from the punches, and Jaime knows his must look worse. “Why give us to another gang?”

“Because the Mummers are the worst thing that can happen to a person, and Catelyn Stark doesn’t want me to die easy.” He sighs, still searching for a way out with his eyes even though he knows he isn’t going to find one. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have been mixed up in this.” 

“What will they do to us?” Brienne asks. Jaime looks at her, and she looks too purposely ready to hear whatever he has to say. He sighs and leans back against the wall.

“They’ll want to ransom us back to Cersei,” he says. “Hoat and his men are all about gold. But they’re a stupid, savage lot. They’ll have their fun with us, first.” He meets her eyes, hating himself for it. “They _will_ rape you. Hell, I might not be safe from that either, but you’re a sure thing.”

“I won’t let them.”

“You won’t be able to stop them.”

“I stopped Stannis’s men.”

“Stannis’s men were gentlemen compared to these monsters,” Jaime insists. He crosses the room to Brienne, trying to will her with his eyes to listen. “If you fight them, they’ll only make it worse for you.”

“You want me to give up?”

“I want you to survive so we can kill every last one of them later.”

Brienne glares at him, uncomprehending, but then the doors to the cellar are wrenched open, and Jaime forgets his own advice. He and Brienne fight back-to-back, and they fare all right for a while until Hoat holds a blade up against Brienne’s throat, and one of his men does the same to Jaime.

It all seems to move very quickly, then, though nothing makes any sense as it’s happening.

The men _do _try to take Brienne, try to drag her out of the cellar to have their fun with her upstairs. She fights them, screaming like a wild creature, all fury and damnation. The sounds she makes go straight to Jaime’s gut, and he keeps thinking that he was trying to preserve this _one _good thing left in the world, and she’s only here because of him, and he can’t let her be hurt.

He babbles out some stupid fucking lie about her father and sapphires, remembering from that old picture book that Tarth was also known as the Sapphire Isle. Hoat holds a hand up and stops the boys and turns to listen. Jaime reminds them what a virgin daughter is worth to a man as rich as Brienne’s father. Brienne’s staring at him, but she doesn’t say anything. Eyes glittering in the firelight. Grateful or confused or furious; he can’t tell.

Hoat buys it, of course. He might be suspicious that Jaime’s full of shit, but he’s too shrewd a man to take the risk of missing out on a bigger payday.

Then he says something that Jaime doesn’t understand. Not at first. Not for a few moments.

He says they were going to send Brienne back to Cersei as a message, once they were done with her. Send her back shattered, violated, so that Cersei would know that Jaime was captured and would understand the stakes. Brienne was the less valuable prisoner. Hurting her wouldn’t matter.

“Send her to Cersei untouched,” Jaime suggests, confused by the leering quality to Hoat’s words. Hoat laughs, and he nods to the man holding Jaime, and suddenly there are four of them, shoving him down, slamming his face onto the table against the wall. One of them grabs his right hand, his _shooting_ hand, and stretches it out on the wood. Brienne screams his name, and she’s trying to fight the men holding her, but it’s no use. One of Hoat’s men has already drawn back, holding the wicked-looking knife above him.

Jaime is _trying. _He’s trying. His boots scrabble at the dirt floor, trying to gain purchase, trying to shove Hoat’s men away, trying to do anything, but he can’t. He can’t, and Brienne screams his name again, and the knife comes down.


	4. Chapter 4

Brienne moves beneath him, shifting, holding his head carefully so that it doesn’t fall off her lap like it did the last time. It still manages to wake him.

Jaime is, regrettably, still alive.

“Water?” he asks, and she helps him sit up a little, and she holds the tin to his lips and helps him drink. When he’s had enough, she pulls him back down, and she holds him again.

They’ve moved camps three times since he lost his hand. The first few days, before the infection set in, they forced him to jog along behind the horse that Brienne was tied up on. Brienne was gagged early because she wouldn’t stop berating them, and also because she bit off Hoat’s ear after he cauterized Jaime’s wound, that first night in the root cellar. Hoat thought he was being funny by grabbing the stump and squeezing hard, laughing about wanting to make to make Jaime weep again, and then Brienne was there with a mouth full of blood, spitting out flesh, and Hoat was screaming and ordering her beaten.

Jaime tried to stop them. Weak and exhausted, on his knees where he had fallen, he tried to get up, and his arm buckled under him, and the Mummers had a good time laughing and shoving his face into the dirt while Brienne was punched and kicked around.

She held him that first night, and she apologized over and over again, as if it was a trade she had made: his hand for her virtue. They were left in the darkness of the root cellar, and Jaime tried to imagine somewhere warmer, brighter, somewhere softer. It was harder than it usually was. His hand wouldn’t stop throbbing. The hand that wasn’t there.

Then they moved, leaving the root cellar behind, and Jaime stumbled along in the mud, desperate not to fall while the Mummers laughed and kicked at his legs as they walked past him. When he fell – and he fell often – the horse would drag him while Brienne tried to shout at them around the gag, and finally they’d force him back to his feet and tell him not to fall again.

Then he got sick, and they started tying him on the horse with Brienne, because he was too weak to stand for any long periods of time, to say nothing of walking for miles. Their mockery then was for his weakness. They loved that he was weak. They loved that he was _Jaime Lannister _and he was helpless. Entirely at their mercy.

He doesn’t care anymore. Didn’t after the first few days, really. He’s too feverish to be embarrassed, and he’s too tired to be angry. At least he can rest, and at least Brienne is warm against him, because otherwise everything is cold. When they tie them face to face, making a cruel mockery of Brienne’s ugliness and Jaime’s maiming and scorning them as _the lovers_, at least Brienne can duck her head close to his as he leans against her, and she can whisper assurances. Promises. Reminders. She’s all fire and blood, savage with the promise of future revenge, but Jaime doesn’t care about that. He’s dying. He’s going to die. Who cares what happens after? He just likes the sound of her voice. Low and concerned for him. He likes that the solid weight of her can hold him up. He likes that she presses her injured cheek against his hair and holds him as best she can without her arms free because he’s hurt and confused and she just wants to _help him_. The words don’t matter.

They sent a messenger to go to Cersei, carrying Jaime’s hand in a box. Jaime had begged them to send Brienne with it, promising that she would return, that her father would pay her weight in sapphires, but they weren’t stupid enough to give her up. He’s selfishly glad sometimes. She’s still here.

When he starts vomiting up every bit of food Brienne is able to force him to eat, they free one of her hands so she can clean him up. They throw dirty rags at her and make her wash out his beard. When they pass a stream or a creek, they take great pleasure in stripping him of his filthy clothing and making Brienne bathe him. She blushes the first few times, and they mock her, making cruel jokes and jeering suggestions and threats Hoat won’t let them carry out. But even the Mummers tire of cruelty eventually, and then they leave them in peace, and Brienne is always gentle with him. She always keeps her eyes averted, and she always wraps him afterward in the coarse towel that’s offered, and she always rubs his arms to warm him back up before she helps him back into his clothes. Stumbling and graceless, but she’s patient. 

Now her hand rubs up and down his arm as he curls tighter against the cold. They’re never given blankets, and they don’t want to sleep by the fire, because it’s better to be out of sight. There’s always a guard with at least one eye on them, but they don’t even bother to tie them up anymore. They know Jaime can’t go anywhere, and they know Brienne won’t go without him.

“You should leave,” Jaime says, the way he always does every night. Brienne never dignifies that with a response, and this time is no different.

Yesterday, the messenger returned and spoke quietly with Hoat, and then they changed direction and started riding south.

Towards Tarth, Jaime is sure.

Cersei rejected the ransom demand, Jaime is sure.

Why wouldn’t she? He’s dying, and they would have asked too much for him.

But maybe he’s wrong. Maybe she’s coming for him. Maybe they’re saddling up right now. Riding out in force to rescue him, Cersei at their head.

If the Mummers reach the shore and send word to Tarth and they find out that Brienne’s father can’t pay them even half of what they want, Hoat will carve off pieces of them until they’re _both_ wishing for death, instead of just Jaime wishing while Brienne stubbornly refuses to let him die.

“They’ll kill us when they find out I lied,” he points out. Brienne rubs his arm again, up and down, soothing him towards sleep. He struggles to sit up. His cough rattles in his lungs. His head swims. His skin burns, and the stump _smells_. He doesn’t know how Brienne deals with it. She’s forced to bear his sickness and his smells as they ride. She never grimaces or scowls at him anymore the way she used to. She never looks anything but concerned for him. If anything, every look has become more tender. He hates it. She should let him die. She should hate him for getting them into this mess.

“They won’t kill us,” Brienne says. She speaks in a voice that makes it sound like she has a plan. He would believe her, because she sounds so sure, except that he knows there’s nothing she can do.

* * *

Except, well. Apparently there is. Jaime’s big enough to admit when he’s wrong, especially when he’s dying of some kind of horrible arm-rot and he has just watched Brienne kill seven men.

It started with Hoat. He was already raving from his own infection from when Brienne tore off his ear with her teeth. Brienne feigned getting up to piss and then grabbed his head by the back of his neck and shoved his face into the fire. As he screamed and burned, Brienne took the pistols from his holsters, and the others were dead within seconds. It was like all time slowed down except for her, Brienne, moving at twice the speed of a normal person. Jaime knew she was a good shot, but he has never seen _anyone _shoot like that, with that kind of speed and that kind of accuracy.

“I knew I couldn’t miss,” Brienne says to him, later, as he’s resting against her back, his head between her shoulderblades as they ride back in the direction of the Lannister camp. He feels her shoulders tense. _I knew I had to save you_, he hears.

* * *

Ellaria spots them first, and she screams, and the rest of them come running. Olenna takes over immediately, because Cersei’s standing and staring at them from the mouth of her tent, her face pale and her eyes wide, too shocked to be of any help. Brienne carries Jaime in her arms like the hero on the cover of some trashy novel, and she shoulders her way into his tent and lays him on his uncomfortable cot. She pushes his sweat-slick hair away from his face, and Olenna starts tutting about fever and infection, and she calls for Qyburn, who’s this weasel-faced little man who Jaime’s never met before. A new maester, thank the gods. Jaime isn’t picky.

Qyburn tries to tell Brienne that she won’t want to be here for the next part, as he has to cut away the infected skin, but Brienne holds tight to Jaime’s remaining hand.

“I’m not leaving him,” she says. Her stubbornness has never been so fucking welcome.

“She’s not leaving me,” Jaime agrees, and Brienne smiles at him. Just a little.

* * *

Losing his hand hurt. What Qyburn does goes beyond pain. It’s a sharp, sweet kind of pain that feels like Qyburn is burning him. _Aerys_, Jaime thinks, remembering the way the fire had roared hot around him when he’d escaped at last from the Targaryen stronghold. He’s never been badly burned, but he imagines it must feel something like this, like something deep below your skin being pried away.

Brienne goes pale a few times, and she closes her eyes a few more, but she never leaves his side, and she manages not to be sick. Jaime gets sick enough for the both of them, and Brienne holds up a bucket for him every time. She lets him scream while Qyburn works and doesn’t try to stop him. She eventually insists he take something for the pain, though he didn’t want to. She looks at him the way she always does, her eyes big and earnest, and he takes the small glass bottle she offers him, and he drinks. She keeps her hand in his, and she allows him to squeeze it hard, cutting off the bloodflow more than once.

“I’m here,” she says when he calls out for her. He’s humiliated when he realizes that he did it, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe she’s just used to it after days (weeks?) of being stuck with him at his weakest. He remembers babbling in the throes of fever when they were with the Mummers. He remembers whispering into her ear as they rode, telling her about Aerys. The oil baron with the plan to burn the Wildlings alive. He remembers weeping like a baby in the immediate horror after they cut off his hand and cauterized it and then left him on the floor of the root cellar. He remembers Brienne holding him, rocking him, clutching him and fighting when they tried to take him away. He remembers seeking out the heat of her body while they slept apart from the others. He remembers her arm around him. He remembers her voice in his ear, whispering promises of revenge.

“We’ll kill them,” she had said, and she _had_, while he lay there useless and sick and…

_Useless. _

The pain is bad enough, but it’s the realization that makes him cry out, then. He’s alive. He’s rescued and alive, but the hand is still gone. It hadn’t mattered much when he thought he was going to die, but now he knows he won’t, and the hand is _gone_. Not injured. It isn’t going to be a period of recovery before he can get back to his old skill. It’s _gone_, and he’s not going to be of any use to Cersei anymore.

_She won’t need me anymore. _

He is so tired of being so weak in front of Brienne. Sobbing, holding his wrist, smelling of his own filth and sick, confused and hurting and just longing to die. But now he cries without shame, and Brienne holds him, wrapping her sturdy arms around him as Qyburn does his foul work.

“I’m here, Jaime,” she promises again. "You're going to be okay." She doesn't seem to realize that that’s part of the problem.

* * *

Only when Qyburn has sewn a flap of skin over his wrist, closing the wound, does Cersei come to see him. Brienne is dozing on the ground by the foot of his cot, her head lowered down to her chest. She’s covered in days of his filth, and he wants to rouse her to tell her to take a dip in the lake and then get back to her own bed, but instead he’s just watching her. The tent flap rustles, and he assumes it’s Olenna or Ellaria, who have both been checking on him through the night, but it’s Cersei. She’s wearing her full day dress, and she looks exhausted. She must have been working on something. Planning something big. She looks down at him with tears in her eyes.

“It’s awful,” she says. She shudders like she can’t bear to look at it. Maybe he’s been looking for an excuse to get mad, because even _that _makes him start to get a bit angry. Brienne stayed with him through all of it. Holding his hand while Qyburn worked. And where was Cersei?

“Is that why you weren’t here?” he asks. He tries to make his voice cold and indifferent, but all he succeeds in is desperation. Pleading. It turns the true question into _why weren’t you here_?

“You know I can’t stomach the sight of blood,” Cersei demurs, which he knows is false, and which she knows he knows is false. It’s a deflection, and not a very good one, but her eyes glitter and he knows she wants him to just listen. “I told you you should have killed the Stark bitch when you had the chance.”

She had, and he’d refused. She thought the insult of a flung bag of gold was worth a cold-blooded murder. He had laughed her off, treated the suggestion like it wasn’t a real one. He suddenly feels so _pathetic_. How could he not have seen her before? How could he have followed her blindly? She looks down at his stump, at the bandages around it, and she shudders and looks away.

If she was in this cot, some part of her hacked off by monsters, he would cover her with kisses. He would hold her tight while she wept. He would promise her revenge, gold, a hundred thousand pretty trinkets and dresses and men to protect her.

_I love you_, he would say. _Every part of you. A hand doesn’t change that._

“When they sent you the ransom,” he says. “What did you do?”

“Do you want me to say I wept prettily for you, brother?” Cersei asks with a smile. There is danger lurking in the corners of it.

“Were you going to come for us?” Jaime asks. Cersei doesn’t stop smiling. There’s hate in it now.

“Of course I was, my love,” she says. Cooing, promising. Lying.

* * *

It is impossible not to realize, after that, that his sister doesn’t love him in the same way he loves her. He had fooled himself for years, knowing privately, knowing with shame, that there was something different in the way Cersei loved him. But he loved her enough to overpower reason. He shoved it aside. He loved her more fiercely. He did everything she asked of him, because she was always most affectionate when he did. A dog begging for scraps from a fickle master.

After he has his hand cut off, she looks at him with a hollow, sneering _lack._ Even at her angriest before, he knew that she wanted him. She always _wanted _him. They were two halves of a person. They were a mirror image. To want him was to want herself, and she always did.

A hand should not change that, he knows. But it does.

The other women flock to his tent in droves. The men do that thing men do where they cough a lot and stumble over their words, unable to force themselves to be sentimental, but they get their sympathies across eventually. The women are more effusive. Even little Jeyne Poole seems to like him more now that he’s less of a threat. She quietly offers him help with everything, and it’s less humiliating than it would be with anyone else, because he knows she has suffered too.

And Brienne. Brienne is patient with his rages and gentle when he sinks into sadness. She forces him to eat, just as she had in the Mummers camp. She rides out when Cersei asks her to, but some of the stars are out of her eyes, and Jaime knows that she has broken the hold that Cersei once had over her. She can see his sister much more clearly now.

For weeks he lingers on his cot like a disease. Haunting his tent. Not healing fully but refusing to die. His rattling cough takes a long time to fade, and his stump burns and itches, and Qyburn tuts and frowns at the flesh when he investigates it. Jaime sponges himself and longs for a bath, and Brienne helps him cut his hair because it has grown far too long to handle. She trims it so it brushes his shoulders, and when he asks why she won’t cut it shorter, she blushes and refuses to answer and then finally snaps upon much pestering that long hair looks well on him. Something loosens up inside Jaime’s chest. Not enough to do away with the lump entirely, but enough to give him hope.


	5. Chapter 5

After six weeks, Jaime is declared as fit as he’s going to get, which makes him laugh bitterly. Qyburn doesn’t try and make him feel better. He talks about adjustments and difficulties and changes to Jaime’s role in the gang. Jaime isn’t sure if the bluntness makes him feel better or worse.

He has lost weight in the weeks he was convalescing, and he can barely walk the length of camp without having to rest and catch his breath, the illness slow to leave him fully. If this is to be the rest of his life, he wishes they had just let him die.

Brienne. He wishes _Brienne_ had just let him die. But she wouldn’t, and she still hasn’t. She’s still there, watching him. Making sure he doesn’t overtax himself. Trying to remind him that there are still so many things that he’s wanted for. She’s kinder to him than he deserves, because he loses his temper too much and is prone to saying snide things that she doesn’t earn.

“You aren’t fooling me,” she says, once, when he’s frustrated by his weakness and sneers at her when she tries to offer him an arm. “Stop trying to fool me into thinking you’re _Euron_. You don’t have anything to be scared of from me.”

He knows that’s it, too, which makes things worse, because she sees him. She knows there’s nothing inherent in his need to jerk away from her help. He’s just _ashamed_. He’s afraid to show how weak he is. He isn’t supposed to be weak. He isn’t _allowed _to be weak. A weak man is a useless man, and a useless man is a man who won’t last long in the Lannisters.

But Brienne won’t let him die, and she refuses to let his feelings of inadequacy drive her away, and after a time it turns his sullen self-loathing into a kind of determination.

He doesn’t just want to endure her kindnesses. He wants to _deserve _them. He wants to have earned them. He still isn’t really sure what the point of his survival is, but if she thinks he’s still worth keeping around, then he’s going to _try_.

* * *

The first day Qyburn tells Jaime he’s well enough to resume his normal daily workload, Brienne finds him standing outside his tent, blinking wearily around as he remembers how much _stuff_ he should be doing. The camp looks like it was pretty well run in his absence – and that just makes it worse because he used to take on so much but now _they don’t need him anymore_ – but he wants to fix all the little things he sees that he doesn’t like. Not enough firewood stacked by the fire. The supply of meat is looking pretty low. No one’s changed the water in the washing tubs yet today. If only he wasn’t so fucking tired.

Brienne doesn’t bother pretending to be coy; it’s not her style. She marches up to him, a basket under one arm like a girl in a meadow in his mother’s old picture book. The skin on her face is burned red and peeling. Her hair has been cut short again. She has a bruise on her jaw from a fight a few days back. She looks ugly as ever but beautiful in a way that makes his heart lurch.

“Come with me,” she says, and he follows.

* * *

They’re camped right on the shores of a beautiful, glimmering lake, but Brienne takes him through the woods a bit to a little inlet. More privacy here, away from everyone else, and Jaime sighs out a grateful thank you when Brienne takes the linen off the top of the basket and reveals soap and towels and some fresh smelling ointment that Qyburn buys special from town for his stump. Brienne looks pleased with his reaction, and she moves immediately to help him with his shirt, which makes him blush more mightily than _she _usually does.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“You aren’t bathing in your clothes,” she tells him brusquely. She indicates the little pile of fresh clothing that she must have already set out here for him, along with a blanket she spread on the sand. There’s a picnic basket, too. A meal of some kind. Jaime feels a softness stirring in him. “It’s not like I haven’t seen everything before,” she reminds him, mistaking his overwhelmed silence for hesitation. Jaime takes over, using his one hand to unbutton his shirt and pants.

“Are you coming in with me?” he asks, and she hesitates. 

“Do you want me to?” she asks.

“I’m a little worried about drowning,” he says, making it into a joke.

* * *

They both strip down, and he turns his back to allow her to slip under the water. He’s bolder about it, though he wishes he hadn’t lost so much muscle mass. He’d like her to look like she wants him, but mostly she looks worried about the prominence of his ribs in the few moments she allows herself to look, before she turns away and starts scrubbing at her arm with a piece of cloth.

It’s awkward for a few moments until he splashes her to get her attention, and then she’s calling him an overgrown child and he’s laughing in her face, and by the end of it, she takes a bar of soap to his back with very little hesitation.

She was always gentle when she washed him when the Mummers made her, though he was too sick to appreciate it as much as he does now, except in the way that he always appreciates a little gentleness. She smooths the bar of soap along the skin of his back, and she scratches lightly, lathering him up with the tips of her fingers, and his cock has been stirring under the water this whole time but it springs to life with a vengeance at the way she touches him. She isn’t asking anything of him. Her care doesn’t come with requirements. She just gives and _gives _to him, because she is a good person, and he wonders if anyone has ever given anything to her.

Jaime has never wanted anyone but his sister, and so this new physical sign of his interest is almost frightening. Men would talk about lust as this creature that grabbed you by the horns and forced you to submit, and Jaime always thought they were making excuses for their shit behavior, because he had only ever wanted one woman. He couldn’t ever imagine his body betraying him, making him want to stray.

This could just be because Cersei doesn’t want him anymore, but he thinks it’s more likely that this has been coming for a long while. Brienne is no beauty, but she has fascinated him since the day he met her, and he has grown to care for her, and the want has followed it.

“I don’t know why you’ve bothered,” he says to take his mind off it. “Anyone else would have let me die.”

“That’s not true,” she says, automatic. Too quickly. That means she knows she’s lying.

“Anyone in this gang would’ve saved their own skins and left me there, and they would have been right to do it,” he says. She turns him around by the shoulder so she can glare at him. He settles down in the water, feeling dizzier than he would have thought. He allows himself to float a little, drifting in a cloud of soap. “You could’ve been killed.”

“And you _would’ve_ been if I left you there. I don’t know why you’re still arguing about this. We survived.”

He scoffs in her direction, but she has turned her back to him, and now she’s scrubbing at the milky planes of her skin, her spine and between her shoulderblades, and he swallows back a biting response. Swallows back his _want_, too, still rising up within him.

“How much longer do you really think I’m going to survive out here like this?” he asks. He raises his stump so she’s forced to look at it when she glances over her shoulder at him, though he feels petty when her eyes swivel, unimpressed, and take in the scarred and puckered skin without flinching or looking away.

“You think I spent all that time keeping you alive just to let you get yourself killed later?” she asks. Scoffed, incredulous. “You can survive this. I’ll help you, if you’ll actually let me.” He hates the way his heart responds to the determination in her voice. Longing and terrible. Wanting. Wanting not just the soft skin and the freckles and the fiery look in her eyes, but wanting everything she has to offer. Her big teeth and big chapped lips. Her thick thighs and her long legs. He wants her naivety and the fact that she’s too serious to be funny and he wants that quizzical look she gives him when she doesn’t understand his jokes. He wants her to look at him with judgement, and he wants to be able to say that he doesn’t deserve it. He wants the gentle way she touches him and the rough way she tries to tease him, even though her banter could still use some work.

He wants. He _wants_. He wants all of it, but he can’t have it. He isn’t enough. He wasn’t enough for Cersei, and he won’t be enough for Brienne. Not useless like this. She’s the best shot out of anyone he’s ever seen. She cares about people, and he’s little better than his sister’s monster. And now she’s offering to _help _him. Drag him along in her wake as she goes on being too good and too generous. 

“Look at me,” she says, and he does, and he sees that she has wandered close enough to shore that the tips of her breasts are above the waterline. He tries not to look, but he can’t help himself. Then he pulls his eyes to hers, and he finds her red and blotchy but defiant as she continues to come closer, rising fully out of the water. She exposes scars and burns. Those scars on her hip when that bear took a swat at her on their hunting trip. A long, silvery swatch from a gunshot graze. “Do you think anything I’ve ever had has come easy to me? Nothing has. No one wants a big, homely wife except a man who doesn’t want one at all. My father didn’t want a daughter who was more interested in shooting than wooing. No rancher wanted to hire a woman who’d embarrass all the other ranch hands and cowboys by being stronger than them. What’s left? What’s left except for this? You gave me a place. Cersei, too, but it was you who made sure I felt welcome. That had nothing to do with your hand.”

Jaime looks at her helplessly as she walks closer. Water drips off of her, and he can’t help but watch it. The way it runs down her skin. She’s staring at him like she’s daring him to argue with her, or kiss her, or tell her to stop coming closer. Daring him to make some kind of move. He feels this sudden terror that this is all some trap, some trick to break him out of the funk he’s been in.

“Brienne,” he starts, and his mouth is dry. She’s right in front of him now, and her eyes bore into his. He swallows convulsively, and just for a moment the want overpowers hm. He gets his feet under him, and he stands up, and he claims her mouth with his.

She makes this noise of surprise that he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget as long as he lives. He’s afraid she’s going to want to pull back, but she doesn’t. She has one hand cupping the back of his head already, pulling him closer.

This one time, he fell off a bridge in the middle of a fight with some Sand Snakes. Stupid shit. Had to be pulled out of the water by Ilyn about a mile down the river. He’d been swept that way, battered about by the current. Smashed his knee against a rock pretty good. Couldn’t ever figure out which way was up. He feels that way now, consumed by Brienne. There are parts that make up a person, and he knows they both have all of them – well, most of them. He feels his heartbeat, feels her breath against his face, tastes her lips and feels the way her fingers tug his hair and expose more of his throat. His one hand is pretty firmly holding on to what little of a breast she has. His stump is restlessly pawing at the rest of her, slick along her hip and up her ribcage. But none of it makes _sense_. It’s all so much at once.

She reaches her free hand down his chest, slowly at first, and then she wraps her firm grip around his cock, and he breaks free of her lips and makes a humiliating sound that’s half gasp and half whine, as if she has punched him. Her other hand, she keeps curved around the back of his neck, gently scratching at the sensitive spot where his hairline ends, and she brings his face to her shoulder, where he’s allowed to pant and gasp as much as he wants as she moves her hand tentatively, stroking him, nervous as if she has never done this before.

Yet she’s all confidence when she laughs a little, maybe gratified by his needy response, the way he breathes her name.

“I bet it’s a lot more difficult to do this yourself with your left hand, isn’t it?” she asks. It’s half mocking, half soothing. A promise that she’s going to take care of him and a reminder that he can’t take care of himself, and he’s about three times harder than he’s ever been in his life, and he can’t believe what’s happening. Is this some fever-dream? Is he going to wake up and find that his head is pillowed in Brienne’s lap, out of sight of the Mummers? His hand still throbbing and slowly poisoning him?

But no, she moves her hand too inexpertly to be a dream, and they’re both a little unsteady with their feet on the bottom of the lake, the waves pushing them into each other and making them both laugh, and it all _feels _real. Sharp and clear, and he’s more present than he’s been since he walked out of that saloon and found Catelyn Stark waiting for him.

“I want you,” he’s saying, and his hips are jerking in her grasp, a warning because she’s _right_, it _is _hard to jerk himself off with his left hand, and he’s been desperate for a little help for the past few weeks, and Brienne’s just so…_much_. She’s so much. He’s not going to last.

“You’ll have me,” she promises, and she kisses him on the temple, and she hums quietly, makes this low sound of amused pleasure that shivers along his skin and hits him straight in the gut. “But not yet,” she says, and she holds the back of his neck even tighter, and he spills.

* * *

After, she practically has to drag him out of the water. He’s exhausted, laughing and trembling and giddy with the newness of this. Quietly terrified.

“We can’t tell her,” he says, and Brienne nods.

“I know,” she says.

“I don’t know if you do,” he realizes. Sick, coming down off the high. He stumbles back into his clothes, feeling shattered and out of place.

“I do. I’ve always known.”

He looks at her, and he sees that she’s looking at him with pity. Not disgust. Not incomprehension. Not even, just, curiosity. Pity.

“I’ve never loved anyone else,” he says. A warning. “I don’t know how to do this with anyone else.”

“I know that too,” she says. There is something sad in her expression, and he laughs at her.

“No you don’t,” he says, and he pushes up onto his toes to kiss her again. “I love you. I _love_ you. I do. You’re the only other one.”

“Oh,” she says when she pulls away. She looks confused, and he laughs again, helplessly. “_Why_?” she asks.

“You’re the only person in my whole life who’s given a damn about me the way you do,” he says. “But I liked you before that. There are a thousand reasons. You’re Brienne. You make me want to be good, and you don’t make excuses for me when I’m not. I could talk to you for hours. I think you’re my best friend. I think you’re beautiful.”

“You know I’m going to sleep with you anyway, right?” Brienne asks, confused. “You don’t need to sweet-talk me.”

“Well, if you’re going to fuck me, you’re going to have to put up with a little sweet-talk. I prefer to never shut up,” Jaime says, and Brienne gives him a look that’s still confused, but also fond and a little incredulous.

“I believe that,” she says at last, and he kisses her again.

* * *

He fucks her for the first time underneath the stars, because they can’t do it at camp. He makes some noise about wanting to go for a ride, and he says he’ll take Brienne for protection, and Cersei lets them go with only a half-suspicious look, already turning back to talk to Euron.

“You know she’s fucking other people,” Tyrion had said to him, before he left, while Brienne was carrying Tyrion’s luggage downstairs and the brothers had a moment alone. “She was fucking the Kettleblack brothers for sure. She’s probably fucking most of them.”

“She isn’t,” Jaime had said, even though he had known it for the truth the moment his brother said it.

It doesn’t hurt anymore like it did when Tyrion told him. Like losing his hand cut off that part of himself that followed his sister blindly. It hurts like an ache, like a memory of a wound long healed. Brienne waits until they’re out of sight of the camp, and then she nudges her horse a little closer so she can lean her long body over the gap between them and kiss him. She flushes pink afterward, blushing, and Jaime smiles larger than he has since he lost his hand.

It isn’t all easy. The horse thing is tough, and he gets a scare when a few strangers stop and have words with Brienne. He can shoot all right with his left hand in a pinch, but he’s not nearly as practiced with it as he is with his right, and they look like a talented bunch. He talks their way out of it, reminding them of that old saying about Lannisters and debts, and then he and Brienne allowed to continue without whatever backwoods gang this is taking the shot they plainly want to.

Fucking with one hand is different, too. He keeps trying to touch Brienne the way he would have touched Cersei. After the first few times he fumbles to touch her with his stump without thinking and then goes quiet with humiliation, Brienne grabs it in her hand, and she keeps it held, her fingers wrapped around it. She brings it up to her lips and she kisses it. It’s sensitive there, a mess of scar tissue and skin that never seems to stop tingling. He can feel her lips there afterward, imprinted. He fucks her harder, like a thank you, like a promise.

Afterward, she’s quiet, laid out on the bedroll next to him. Sweat still cooling on their skin. He wants to get a blanket to cover them up, but he’s a little nervous by how quiet she is. He doesn’t want to make her feel trapped if she’d rather leave.

“I thought it’d hurt more,” she finally says. “My father had a second wife. She said it would hurt. She said any man who’d marry me would be desperate to get it over with, and they’d only be able to use me roughly.”

“_What_?” Jaime asks, incredulous, lifting himself on one elbow to look at her in the moonlight. She looks thoughtful, not as amused as he was hoping. It’s not a joke.

“She wanted to prepare me for my future. My father wanted me to marry well, and that meant men with money who couldn’t buy themselves prettier wives. Anyone who could pay and would take me wouldn’t be much of a husband. In a way, she was trying to be kind.”

“She was trying to _scare _you.”

“It would have been scary,” Brienne points out. “That’s why I left.”

“Because running with outlaws is so much less frightening,” Jaime says. She laughs a little and leans in to kiss him on the shoulder, finding his skin in the dark. She gets up and starts putting clothes back on, which really is too bad, but probably the wisest choice.

“I can handle outlaws. I don’t know if I would have been able to handle a vile husband.”

“What about Renly?” Jaime asks. He regrets it instantly as Brienne goes still, fumbling a bit with her breeches in the dark. She sighs and turns to him.

“He never took my maidenhead, if that’s what you’re asking. I ride a lot of horses, so I…”

“Believe it or not, no, I didn’t even consider that,” Jaime says with a grin. “I just meant…you found a husband. And there was nothing about Renly that was vile.”

“I found a friend who needed me. I like being…useful,” Brienne admits quietly.

And, well. Of course she does. That makes sense with everything that Jaime has seen of Brienne so far. But…

“Is that what this was for you? Being useful? Helping me because my right hand is gone and my sister doesn’t want to fuck me anymore?” Brienne flinches and kneels down next to him.

“Of course not,” she says.

“You can tell me if it’s…”

“It isn’t. We rode into that small town, and you told me that the man you were being sent to kill was your brother, and you wept. You tried to hide it, but I saw, and I loved you then. I watched you suffer and I listened to you beg to die, and I told myself that I would give you anything that I could give. It isn’t because I want to feel useful. It’s because you looked at me like you wanted me, and I had already wanted you.” 

He will not speak his relief aloud, but he sits up and kisses her again, and he hopes that she can feel it.

* * *

Love’s a funny thing when someone like Jaime feels it. Cersei always said that the two of them _wanted _too much, and that’s probably true. He wanted love and Cersei wanted power, and together they made such a formidable pair because she would do anything to win and he would do anything to give her whatever fool thing she wanted.

He hasn’t _stopped _loving Cersei. He doesn’t think such a thing is possible when he’s as old as he is and he’s loved his sister for as long as he has. But she has hurt him. She has hurt him for years, and now there’s this other woman – stronger and bigger than him but gentler than Cersei ever has been – who has shown him that love doesn’t _have _to hurt. It doesn’t have to be consuming and painful. It doesn’t have to mean selling half your soul to a person who tries to take all of it.

Brienne never asks more of him than he offers to give, and it makes him want to give her everything, and the loss of his hand is less humiliating when she’s there with him, never looking at him like he’s lost everything that made him good.

She only ever kissed him after he lost his hand. He thinks of that a lot, when he starts to worry. She never kissed him before that. She never showed any sign of wanting him before that. She says that she fell in love with him when he showed his pain at the thought of killing Tyrion, and he likes to believe her, because he wants to believe that his weakness looked to her like a strength. He finds he likes the thought of that.

* * *

But Cersei.

She’s too clever not to notice how close he and Brienne have gotten. Brienne never shows any sign of having kissed him or fucked him or wrapped her hand around his cock or tasted him. She’s good at that blank kind of mask behind which she hides everything. But Cersei has this penetrating vision. She sees _something_. Jaime isn’t sure what, exactly. From experience, he thinks it’s probably not the truth, because Cersei is good at convincing herself of what she wants to see. But it’s enough that he worries for Brienne. He worries when Cersei gives her jobs to do, and he worries when Cersei demands that Brienne stay behind and let the others ride out. He’s suspicious all the time, and he’s exhausted, and he wonders if this is what Cersei feels like when she rants about Tyrion being after her and their enemies being around every corner. It’s miserable. He hates it. No wonder Cersei is the way she is.

They let him ride with them sometimes, even though he can’t be a part of the actual operations. He usually hangs back with Cersei, watching from some hill. Watching the boys and Brienne rob a train, or take down a stagecoach, or round up and kill some of Stannis’s men. Always his missing hand itches, his trigger finger twitching. He’s never really enjoyed it, killing. Not after, anyway. He loved the adrenaline and the danger and he loved that he was good at it, but afterwards he would lie awake and wish that he had chosen a different path. That he and Cersei had run that first night and _kept _running. Somewhere they would be safe, where no one knew them.

He knows now that Cersei never wanted that, but still. He wished.

Now he longs for the way things used to be, when he would be down there with the rest of the gang, but he feels a little bit of relief, too. Relief that he _can’t_.

Cersei can’t ask too much of him. There is nothing he can give.

He sits on his horse beside Cersei, and he watches Brienne fight the battles he can no longer fight, and he’s not even sure what he’s longing for, but he knows he’s longing for _something_.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's a bit short, but the Big Finale will either be one single Big Finale or will be split into two chapters, so I wanted to end on this part!

Cersei’s radiant when she describes the train job.

She describes it to all of them with a glimmer in her eye and an almost mischievous air that reminds Jaime of when they were still starting out. Every opportunity to create chaos and ruin the lives of rich men like Robert Baratheon was exciting. Cersei planned jobs in a way that Tywin Lannister would have been proud of, if he’d ever deigned to pay attention to Cersei beyond the marriage she could make. And her ideals…

Well, Tywin would have hated them, but they were ideals that Jaime was proud of, once. He _liked_ that there was a point to it. Their first train robbery, it was a Targaryen train. Cersei had pointed out their abuses of power, their working conditions, their immorality. _They’re the perfect people to hit_, she had said. _Because they don’t deserve to keep what they have. _

It was easy to cling to a dream like that. _We’re doing the right thing. We’re doing a good thing_.

They made enough to support themselves and keep themselves alive, but the rest of it…

It wasn’t like they were ever going to make themselves rich. They just needed enough to live, and the rest was for _justice_. There was a time when Jaime genuinely believed that. That Cersei was content with doing small jobs and running from the law because at least they weren’t hurting anyone but the people who hurt others.

She was clever enough to change things slowly. There were noble outlaws who fought the system, and they liked the Lannisters at first, so good people flocked to them. People like Barristan Selmy, who fought against the government because they had disenfranchised the native Free Folk. People like Arthur Dayne, who would only lend his shooting arm to the truly worthy. Jaime idolized them. He wanted to be like them. Noble men who did _good _because the government was the one in the wrong.

They left. Slowly, without giving any reasons to Jaime. They found better, more noble causes, and still Jaime didn’t realize.

By the time he understood that he and Cersei weren’t doing anything that Selmy or Dayne could be proud of, it was too late. They were already too far gone. Cersei started hitting trains owned by people who by all accounts were fine enough men. She started striking out at smaller gangs like themselves, getting wrapped up in turf wars instead of going after the people who were more valuable and more deserving of Jaime’s bullets. Jaime started wondering, sometimes, if she was being paid by the bigger businessmen to stay away, because she’d always have cash to pay for things even though Jaime would know that the numbers weren’t right.

He’d ask, sometimes. Suspicion making him see her truly for flashes at a time. She’d remind him that he wasn’t there to check her math. She’d remind him that he was never very good at numbers. She’d remind him that all he had to do was trust her. He would listen.

With his hand gone, it’s different. It isn’t really that he suddenly _stops_ trusting her, but he knows now that her wounded exclamations of _don’t you trust me, brother? _were manipulations. A veneer of love that she used to gloss over everything because she needed him to think that she was ruled by her emotions, at least when it came to him. She needed him to think that he was an exception, and he did. She needed him to fear upsetting her, so she withheld her love from him whenever he showed the slightest hint of slipping, and it worked.

Like it would on a trained dog, it worked on him.

But it’s more than just his opened eyes that make her seem strange about this train thing. Jaime knows he isn’t the only one who hears the mania in her voice. Something that seems glittering and shiny if you don’t look at it too closely, but it’s shards of jagged glass when you do.

“Are we rushing this?” Jaime wants to know, late one night, quiet, standing just inside the flap of her tent. She stands from the bath she was soaking in. She lets him look his fill, this expression on her face like she knows exactly what he wants. She would have been right about that for so much of their lives. He can’t really blame her for not seeing it now.

There’s an echo of lust for her, somewhere. And there’s still love, even though it’s a wounded, one-sided, regretful kind. A bad habit he's still in the midst of breaking. But looking at Cersei’s body doesn’t have the same effect on him now. Maybe it _is_ the changing trust. Or maybe it's simpler. Maybe she’s just too small for him, now.

Maybe he's tired of ceding control to someone all day. Yielding and yielding to another person’s will and yet pretending at power in her cot whenever she wanted him. _Fuck me_, she would demand. _Harder. Like you need me_. He did, because he wanted her however he could get her.

When they were growing up, their father raised them so separately. Maybe they were always fated to want what they couldn’t have. Cersei took control of Jaime however she could. She demanded of him that he use the gifts that their father wouldn’t let her hone. She wanted him hard and brutal and strong: everything she was not _meant _for, according to their father. He _was_ her, he was an extension of her, and so wanting him savage and terrible was her way of _being _savage and terrible. Using her twin's body to enact things she had been raised to think she could not want.

Jaime isn’t sure that he could ever articulate it, even now. Discussion of his feelings isn’t really what he does. But now, now that everything has happened with Brienne, he understands more about his wants. Being cared for gently. Being wanted not as a reflection or as a half of a self, but as a whole man. _Taken care of_, maybe. There’s a war always inside him between wanting softness and knowing softness means weakness, but the battle sounds quiet when Brienne is with him. Her softness never makes him feel weak, and neither does the softness she inspires within him.

Whenever Cersei used to hold him down, pin him with her hands, it was because she didn’t want him to touch her. It wasn’t because it was what he wanted, to cede control to someone he trusted to make him feel good. When Cersei kissed him, it was to remind him of his devotion, not because she loved him.

She did, once. Love him. Maybe treasure him the way he thinks Brienne might. But it has become twisted by her fear and her need for strength, and he is sorry for it. He is sorry that he could never understand it, and he is sorry for the accident of birth that made him the man and she the woman, and he is sorry for the fact that they were forced into roles because of their sex that they didn’t want.

But now? Now, it isn’t love. Jaime is a tool to his sister. He has been a tool for a long while, but now he’s a broken one. He has no idea what her plans are for him, but he sees the way she looks at him over the map when she’s planning things, and the way her shoulders are straight and stiff as her gaze roams down to his stump.

_It’s awful_, she had said, and maybe there was some sympathy there, some little bit of Cersei left showing him genuine sorrow for what he had suffered, but he knows it was mostly for herself. He has always been the easiest person for her to manipulate. Not even Gregor is so loyal. But what use is he now? Why would she bother to expend the effort of manipulating him at all? Why is she still standing there in the bath, naked and wet, like she wants him to touch her even though he knows she doesn’t?

“Sweet brother,” she says. Water drips off her body. “Don’t you trust me?”

“It isn’t about trust,” he says, and she tilts her head. She goes through the mechanics, and he sees it now for the dance that it is. Giving him a flash of a smile. A taste of the affection and care that he wants. A glimpse of her body. She aims to gentle him the way he gentles horses or dogs with a few well-placed pats and sweet words. Bringing them to heel.

“Isn’t it?” she asks. “You’ve never had a problem before, and now suddenly you do. I wonder why that is.”

Terror lances through him, but he won’t show it. Cersei’s a clever woman in her way, but she has a habit of blindness. She seizes on an idea, and no amount of proof to the opposite will change her mind. It’s possible that she’s spotted some sliver of truth of what Brienne has come to mean to Jaime, but it’s also possible that she’s on the wrong track entirely, and he won’t give her anything more.

“It’s because we’re rushing this, and I can tell,” he says. He steps further into the tent, trying to look as supplicating as he ever was. Trying not to think of the way Brienne had looked rising from the water in the lake. His fever still on him, making his head swim as he watched her approach.

“Because you have such a head for planning these operations,” Cersei says, smiling at him, amused by his mounting wrath. “My genius little brother.”

He hates it when she calls him _little brother_, and she well knows it. She still stands there, growing cold and drying in the air. She wants him to make a move so she can turn him gently away. Rebuff him in a way that still makes him think of love. She wants him to look his fill because she thinks it will be enough to delay him. _She’s a fool_, he thinks, uncharitably, for the first time. She’s always calling him simple, always lamenting that she was stuck with the stupidest Lannister as a partner while their baby brother got all the smarts that Tywin had to offer his male children. And Jaime had worn it, and absorbed it, because it was _true_. But this… She’s a fool. She’s a fool, and he doesn’t know how to fix it.

“Is there something we’re running from?” he asks. She curls one perfect lip up in a show of disdain. “Let me help you.”

She looks at his stump pointedly. One eyebrow raising. She doesn’t say anything cruel; she doesn’t have to.

“We’re always running from something. You know that,” she says, instead of reminding him that he can’t help her like he used to.

“But you’re more scared, now. It isn’t like you to hit big targets like this. You know the risk. And after Storms End…”

“Storms End was Storms End. It won’t happen here.”

No one has ever really filled him in on the details of what happened on Storms End. He just knows that Cersei killed a woman, a mark who was helping them. Killed her in cold blood right in the middle of a job, like she couldn’t wait an hour to be done with her, and it has made some members afraid of her. Things have changed since Jaime lost his hand, but he knows it started before that. People don’t look at Cersei the way they used to. He was just the fool who took longest to see it. Sweet little Jeyne Poole disappeared yesterday, saddling up her horse in the middle of the night and leaving the gang for good. She took Euron's nephew with her, Theon. Olenna and Margaery are looking shifty sometimes, and even Taena has been squirreling away her cut of the pay in a way that means she’s keeping her options open. Ellaria won’t last much longer, either.

Podrick avoids Cersei openly, and Ilyn looks after her with a grimace on his face when he doesn’t think anyone’s looking. It’ll only take one more mess for Sandor to up and leave, no matter what his brother tries to make him do. The gang is falling apart, and the last thing they need is a fucking train job.

“All we have to do is blow the bridge and trap the train on our side of it. Then we take it by force. Hit them hard before they have a chance to react. They’re guarded well, but not _that _well.”

“I know how they’re guarded,” Jaime reminds her. “I’ve been running train jobs for you for years.”

“Well, you won’t be running this one,” she says. “I need you back at camp, watching over the women. Making sure that old bitch Olenna Tyrell doesn’t get any ideas about leaving the way the Poole girl and Greyjoy did.”

“Cersei, I can ride a horse and shoot fine. I should be there.”

“You’d be a liability,” she tells him bluntly. She’s probably right, is the worst part.

“Cersei…” he starts, but she sinks back down into the water, like a mother disappointed and taking a favorite toy away from a child. It makes him want to laugh. “What happened to us taking on the world together? It’s always been you and me.”

“You’re not the same man you were,” she says, looking pointedly at his missing hand, and with a note of finality that means there is nothing left to say.

* * *

With Brienne, he likes it when she takes control. It started in the lake that day, her overcoming her awkward shyness and wrapping her hand around him like she knew exactly what he needed.

She likes it too, because it gives her a chance to learn things. She learns his body like she learns anything else, looking him over with this sort of figuring look, eyes trailing over him.

“I spent a long time trying to pretend I wasn’t looking,” she says once. She’s straddling him in their tent. They’d pitched it in the trees, well away from the road, so he’d felt comfortable enough to strip off completely and lie on his back as she trailed her fingertips over his skin. Everything has been such _shit _lately except for this, and so he lets her look and touch her fill, enjoying the way she concentrates so fully on it. Like he’s a gun she’s trying to take apart and clean, but she hasn’t figured out the mechanics yet.

Of course, she _has _figured out the mechanics. They’ve only been doing this a few weeks, but Brienne is a quick study. She knows how to make him gasp and swear. She knows how to make him stop moving even when he desperately wants to writhe under her touch. She knows what to say to make him flush red all over.

She knows he likes to be praised, which he thought he’d be more embarrassed about, but it’s hard to be embarrassed with Brienne, because she accepts every part of him with so much kindness and grace, and he stops worrying before he’s ever even fully started. She knows he likes her to hold his wrists down while she’s on top of him. She knows he likes for her to touch his hair, after, run her fingers through it.

He knows that she likes when he looks her in the eyes. He knows that she likes when he touches her, when his fingers explore her skin, even the parts that don’t seem like they’d rouse much excitement in a woman. She likes to be shown affection. Nuzzling at her neck, kissing her forehead. She likes holding onto his stump, brushing her thumb over the scars. She likes it because _he _likes it, and because she likes the feel of it, and because she likes the reminder of the man he was and the man he became after he lost his shooting hand.

“It’s all collapsing,” he tells her. She’s straddling him, running her hands up his ribcage in a way that might tickle but he doesn’t ever want her to stop. She frowns at him, and she brings her hands back down to meet in the middle of his stomach.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“The train job Cersei’s planning. I think she’s scared. I think she wants to get out.”

“She said something to me about Dorne,” Brienne admits. “How we need enough to get to Dorne and set up nice there, where no one’s going to be looking for us.”

It stings that Cersei’s telling Brienne stuff that she was purposefully avoiding telling him, but he doesn’t let on. He just frowns up at her, seeing the way her big eyes look wary, feeling the way her fingers stop moving.

“This train job,” he says. “It’s dangerous.”

“They all are,” Brienne replies.

“Stannis is getting close.”

She smiles, a little savage.

“I know he is,” she says. He sighs, and he sits up, and he pulls her into a kiss with a hand on the back of her neck.

“I need you to be careful,” he says. He will not ask her to stay, because he knows she never would, even if Cersei would let her. “I need you to come back to me.”

He can tell just by the way her breathing changes that she likes the desperate way he says that. Brienne isn’t a woman who has had much cause to make a man desperate before, not in the way she makes _him_. Sometimes it seems funny that the two of them met up somehow: a man who had too much love and nowhere to put it and a woman who needed more love than the world would give her. He kisses her harder.

“I love you so fucking much,” he says. “I need you to come back to me.”

“I’ll come back to you,” she promises, and she kisses him nearly breathless. “I’ll come back to you.”


	7. Chapter 7

He knows immediately that the job has gone wrong. He’s not sure how. Instinct, or maybe just because he expected it would. He finds that he’s preparing for the end of everything even before it comes.

He watches Brienne and Cersei ride off together. Them and all the rest of the gang who can be trusted to shoot straight, and who have two hands to hold the reins when things get tough. Brienne looks back at him over her shoulder when they’re well down the road. One last sly smile. Knowing and loving him anyway, somehow.

Cersei doesn’t look back at all. Not that it’s a surprise anymore, but. It’s just worth noting.

He wasn’t involved in any aspect of planning this job, but he knows it the way he has known every one of their jobs. Memorized every step. He knows exactly how long it should take.

When they’re more than fifteen minutes off the mark, he resigns himself. When they’re an hour off the mark, he knows for sure.

Even before that, even before they’re late at all, Olenna and Margaery sneak off. Ellaria and Taena and Qyburn go down to the river to wash up their things, pretending like they’re not all on edge and nervous, and Olenna walks straight up to him and asks if he’s going to try to stop her.

“You know I’m not,” he says, and she smiles a little. Pats him on the shoulder.

“Good,” she says.

He even helps them, lifting their packs onto their horses and making sure they’re secured on tight. He offers them a little cash, but Olenna scoffs and turns up her nose. Before she allows him to help her on her horse, she kisses him on the cheek.

“You be safe,” he says.

“She’s going to be the death of you, boy. Come with us.”

“I can’t,” he says, and Olenna sighs. “I can’t leave without Brienne,” he elaborates, and Olenna gives him a real, if rueful, smile. She pulls him into a hug. Stronger than he expected. 

“Find us, then. After. You lovelorn old fool.”

None of the others are surprised to find the Tyrells gone when they come back from the river. Taena gives him a dirty look, and he knows she’ll tell Cersei he didn’t bother to stop them, but Ellaria more than once looks speculatively at her horse where it’s tied up near the road out of camp, and he knows she’s thinking about following them.

* * *

At last, two hours late, he hears the hoofbeats of approaching horses, and Cersei rides into camp. There are…

There are too few others, and his heart thuds so hard in his chest that it _startles _him.

Gregor is there. Sandor isn’t. Podrick is there. Ilyn. Fucking _Euron_.

Brienne.

_No_.

“Where’s Brienne?” he asks. “Where’s Sandor?”

“Sandor’s dead,” Gregor says. He throws a bag of gold at Jaime’s feet.

“He got in the way of a well-placed shot,” Euron says, laughing as he jumps down from his horse, another bag soon slung over his shoulder. “Wasn’t Gregor’s fault, really.”

Jaime feels sick. He looks at Cersei. She’s smiling down at Euron, who’s holding out a hand to help her down.

“Where’s Brienne?” he asks again, louder.

“She fell,” Podrick answers.

“She fell off the train?” Jaime asks.

“She _fell_,” Podrick repeats, looking pale and young and scared. Jaime looks at his sister, who’s already opened the bag Euron drops at her feet. Her delicate fingers slip through the gold coins, and her smile is brilliant and terrifying, and he _sees _her.

“This is good,” she says. “This is very good. Not nearly as much as I wanted, but it’s enough.”

_It will never be enough_. She’s looking at the gold with a temporarily sated hunger, but he knows the truth of it now. He knows the truth of _her_. She will never be satisfied. It will never be enough. It will never be over. And Brienne…

“Where did she fall?” he asks.

“She’s dead, you deaf fuck,” Euron says. “She got in the way, and she’s dead.”

“She was trying to help me,” Podrick says, his voice very quiet. He’s the only one who hasn’t yet gotten down off his horse. “They got her.”

“_They_?” Jaime asks. He feels like he’s falling apart. He remembers the feeling of Brienne’s hands, holding him down, keeping him steady, and that’s exactly what he needs because without that, he’s drifting in the wind. They. _They _got her. “Who has her?”

“Jaime, you’re becoming hysterical,” Cersei says in a droll sort of way, and Taena laughs.

“I can give you a draught of something,” Qyburn offers with sympathy that might be real, and Jaime realizes that they’re all staring at him. _Is _he hysterical?

“Who has her?” he asks again. It doesn’t feel like hysteria at all to him. It feels like fury. Like raw, poisonous fury. Choking him, dragging him down into darkness. They’re looking down at the bags of gold like they’re the only thing in the world that matters. Cersei’s already planning three steps ahead. Euron’s laughing. Taena’s laughing. Brienne is _gone_, somewhere, and they don’t care. Why would they care? Sandor’s dead, and they’ve already moved on, and he was with them years longer than Brienne was.

“Stannis,” Podrick says.

“Stannis,” Jaime repeats, dry, turning his gaze towards Cersei. “He’ll hang her.”

“Maybe,” Cersei allows. “If she makes it that long. She was shot, Jaime. She was shot, and she fell off the train. Stannis’s men surrounded her, but she may have already been dead. Going back for her would have accomplished nothing. She knew the risks.”

“If she isn’t dead, we need to move,” Euron reminds her. “They’ll question her.”

Jaime knows what he must look like. Helpless and lost and pathetic. Cersei actually softens a bit as she looks at him.

“She’s one girl,” she says to him. “We can’t risk everything for one girl.”

“One girl,” Jaime sneers. “There was a time you would have done everything to save one of our own.”

Cersei looks as if she has been struck by his words, but he knows they didn’t hit deep enough to change anything. Her mouth twists, and she turns away.

“Everyone pack up,” she says.

She doesn’t look at Jaime. No one does except for Euron, who winks at him before following Cersei to her tent, talking of what he thinks their next steps should be. Jaime watches them go, and the fury makes a home in him, digging deep.

“Pod,” he says.

“I know where they’ll take her,” Podrick replies.

* * *

They ride hard. Harder than Jaime has ridden since he lost his hand. Podrick knows of a little town near where the train job went down. Stannis and his men will have taken it over. He’s sure of it, and Jaime trusts him, because there isn’t anything else to do. Podrick has always had a head for maps and territories. He always seems to understand which parts of Westeros belong to which gangs, even the smaller ones that Cersei considers below her notice.

They ride until they arrive in Pennytree, just as the sun is beginning to set. It looks like it was once a bustling enough town, but the buildings are abandoned and the people are nowhere to be seen. Only Stannis’s men, lurking in the street, trying too hard to look like a lazy, loitering populace. Might be more convincing if they weren’t all adhering to Stannis’s absurd dresscode. Their sharp suits are too out of place in this dusty relic of a town.

There’s a gallows built near the crumbling shell of an old saloon, but he doesn’t see Brienne anywhere from the hill they’re watching from. Podrick points out a building down at the end of a dock, right on the river.

“There,” he says. “That white one is the horse Stannis was riding. That’s where they’ll have taken her. They’re expecting us.”

Podrick is a bright boy; even through the panic, Jaime can tell that he’s right. There’s no other reason for Stannis to have chosen the building on the end of the dock for his headquarters. He expects the Lannister gang to ride through the center of town, and he expects his men to take them out, and he sits comfortable and safe, guarding his bait in a building he’s sure the gang has no hope of reaching.

There’s an old lighthouse overlooking the town, and Jaime sighs as he looks up at it. As much as he’d like to charge in with Podrick and kill every one of them, he knows he isn’t the shot he used to be. If he was Brienne, if Brienne was in his place…but he isn’t. With both hands, he would have been able to take them all on. He’s sure of it. But now he has to be smart.

* * *

It’s easy to shoot the scoped rifle with one hand. He can balance it on his bent elbow, and as he stands up at the top of the lighthouse, he finds he’s better at shooting than he ever was. The adrenaline, maybe, making everything very simple. He tracks Podrick’s progress on the street below as the boy ducks alongside buildings and avoids gunfire and then pokes his head back out and shoots. Jaime covers him until at last there are no more men left alive, and then he takes his gun and sprints down the stairs and down the street to Podrick. The lad is waiting for him by the dock, and together they make their way down to the building on the end.

Jaime kicks in the door. Doesn’t need two hands to do that.

There are three men inside. He and Podrick are both ready to take them down, but there’s no need; Brienne is already in the process of killing them.

Jaime laughs when he sees it. She’s bleeding sluggishly from a shot in her shoulder, and she’s bruised about the face, but she’s beating them singlehandedly. She lays the last one flat with a mighty punch, and then she crouches over him, grabs him by the front of the shirt, and pulls him up.

Stannis, Jaime realizes.

“Remember me?” she asks, and she lets the fear sink into Stannis’s eyes before she pulls out a knife and finishes the job.

* * *

After, Jaime supports her with an arm around the waist, and her own arm pulled around his shoulders. He’s shaking with the adrenaline rush, and his hand can’t seem to keep still on her, touching parts of her that he would normally not allow himself to touch in front of Podrick. They’ve spent weeks hiding their closeness from the gang, but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore that the boy’s with them. He slides his fingers down her ribcage to check for injuries. He cups her cheek and kisses it sloppily. He brushes his hand through her hair. She’s distracted and near-euphoric with the win of killing Stannis, and she tells them about how she used the distraction of their gunshots from the street to break free and overpower them.

She goes quiet after a while, and then she tells them something that changes everything.

“Stannis sent most of his men on to camp,” she says. “Cersei…Cersei was feeding them information about the other gangs. She was their inside man, but Stannis said he’s done dealing with her. He means to see the gang taken down. Jaime, Stannis said…he said Cersei was the one who told him where to find Renly in the first place. They caught her in Storms End. Said they’d let her go and pay her gold to keep on informing, and that’s exactly what she did. That’s why she didn’t send anyone for us when the Mummers took us. She sold them out for gold instead. Stannis was supposed to take us all down. _Us, _Jaime. You and me alongside the Mummers. They would have had us hanged. She…”

“Stop,” he says. “I understand.”

She looks at him, then. Resigned. Understanding.

“Did you know?” she asks.

“No,” he says quickly. “No, of course not. But it…it makes sense. The gang was always a means to an end with her.”

“Stannis was a monster, but he wasn’t half the monster Cersei said he was, was he?” Brienne asks. He shakes his head. He hates the way she’s looking at him.

“That’s what Cersei does. It’s what she’s always done. She tells people what they need to hear to get them to sacrifice everything. I’m sorry.”

“And you helped her.”

Acceptance has replaced the fury that he felt all during his ride here. He looks at her beautiful eyes. He looks at her lip, bitten as it is between her teeth, like she’s hoping he says something other than what she plainly knows he’s going to say.

“I helped her,” he says. “I would have helped her do anything. Even if I _had _known she was selling out…”

“Jaime,” Brienne says, startled.

“I would have helped her. I would have done _anything_ for her. I would have killed anyone she asked me to. I would have killed Renly myself if she’d suggested it.”

“Jaime,” Brienne says again. She must hear something in his voice, because she looks afraid, now.

“Listen,” he says. He reaches into his pack, and he takes out a wad of cash that he’s been saving secretly. Thinking, maybe hoping, that they could strike out on their own if Cersei insisted on following through on this fool plan to go to Dorne. “Take this.”

“_Jaime_,” Brienne argues.

“Take this, and take the boy, and _go_. As far as you can get.”

“I’m going with you,” Brienne says, like it’s obvious. And maybe it is, for her. Maybe she’s too noble to see the writing on the wall. But _he _isn’t.

“You can’t,” he says. “You got what you needed. You killed Stannis. You avenged Renly. You need to get out of this shit while you still can.”

Brienne rears back to look at him.

“What are you saying?” she asks. Her voice shakes. He _hates _it. He’s close to tears himself, but he can’t let himself be. She’s the only good thing left in the world, and he needs to save her.

“What Cersei and I did, we did for years. We killed people who didn’t deserve it. We left people destitute, might as well have killed them ourselves. Catelyn Stark was right to send me to the Mummers. I should have died there. You, this. It was everything. But you’ve got a life to get back to, and so do I.”

She pulls away even further. Her eyes are bigger than ever. He hates when she looks at him like that, piercing and knowing and seeing. He hates it because he knows she’s seeing exactly what’s there, and he wishes sometimes that she would look at him and see the man she deserved instead of the man who was only ever going to ruin her.

“You’re going back to her,” she says.

“She’s my sister. I have to try to save her.”

“She was going to let me die,” Brienne says, and he cannot look at her. Her tone is brutal. Unforgiving. _You are choosing her instead of me_, it says. And it isn’t true, but he knows it must feel like it. And if that’s what she needs to believe…

“She was going to let _me _die, too, remember,” he says. “And that wasn’t enough to make me leave.”

Hurt, then, flashing across her eyes. Podrick is staring at him as if he doesn’t understand. Of course he doesn’t. He saw the desperate way that Jaime hunted for Brienne. He saw the way he looked at Cersei back at camp when she chose to follow Euron’s plan instead of going back for the most noble of any of them.

“She’s going to die,” Brienne says. “And you’re going to die with her.”

He swallows back a thousand words that he longs to speak. He quiets the part of his mind that has spent the past weeks thinking of impossible things, impossible dreams like a little cabin somewhere and a child held in his arms. A _family_.

“This is how it was always going to be,” he says.

* * *

He rides back to Cersei.

There is no final kiss with Brienne. There is no promise that he’ll try to find her when everything is done. He knows that he won’t survive the confrontation. He barely thinks there’s a hope that Cersei will, but he can’t just let her die.

He thinks of Olenna Tyrell, telling him that Cersei would be the death of him. She’s right, of course. Maybe there was a time, when they were younger, when he could have done something about it. Exerted a little bit of his will and changed things. Saved both of them from the choices they eventually made. But that time is long past. It is too late to save Cersei from the path she’s been on since she was a girl. Bitterness and fear warring within her and melding her into the woman she has become.

It is too late for her, and it is too late for him, too.

He thinks of Brienne on his ride. Brienne as she was several nights ago, smiling down at him with her knees on either side of his hips. Brienne as she was months ago, shy and uncomprehending and prickly about everything. Brienne that first night, tense and coiled with rage and despair, grieving Renly and turning that grief into drive. If there’s one consolation in the world as he rides back to face his sister, it’s that he knows Brienne will survive this. She doesn’t know how to do anything else.

* * *

It’s dark when he arrives back at camp.

Most of camp is gone already. Ellaria’s wagon left ruts in the dirt. Taena’s horse isn’t where she left it. Cersei is standing at the mouth to the cave in which he knows she’s buried most of the money. Her skirts and hands are dirty; she’s already dug it up. Ilyn is packing up the cart that holds the provisions, and some of Euron’s mercenaries are rolling up the remaining tents. Euron is talking urgently to Cersei. Gregor stands beside her, his arms folded over his chest. Qyburn is the only one who notices Jaime at first; he’s hoisting himself up onto his horse, and he freezes halfway up, probably taking in the barely contained fury of Jaime’s expression.

“Get going,” Jaime tells him. “Baratheons are on their way.”

Qyburn is loyal to Cersei, but still he rides. Even _he _knows she’s losing her grip.

At the sound of Qyburn’s retreat, Cersei finally spots Jaime, and she watches him approach. She looks haughty and closed-off in a way that used to haunt him when he was younger, make him desperate to make it right. He’s not sure _what _it makes him feel now. It isn’t hate. Not even after everything. But it certainly isn’t the same love it was.

“Stannis Baratheon is dead,” he says. He tilts his hat back with his stump, just to watch Cersei look at it. Some impulse to remind himself that Cersei hates this broken bit of him. “But before he died, he sent men this way. They should be on us soon.”

“Did your great beast of a girl talk before they killed her, then?” Cersei asks. Jaime smiles. She is so, so very predictable in these last moments. He aches for her, and for himself.

“I think we both know it wasn’t Brienne,” he says.

* * *

Things move very quickly, then.

Cersei orders Gregor to kill him. Gregor listens. Why wouldn’t he? Gregor always listens to Cersei. The years of riding with Jaime, answering to Jaime, it means nothing. This gang was never Jaime’s. He was always just a tool, like the rest of them.

But Gregor is slow and mean, and he’s a stupider Lannister than Jaime if he thinks Jaime’s going to fight him one-on-one.

It’s Aerys all over again. This assumption from a dishonorable man that he would fight with honor just because he’s challenged to. Gregor thinks to give Cersei and Euron time to escape. He knows he can crush Jaime handily.

Jaime knows it, too. He shot Aerys in the back for being a fucking monster because it’s what he deserved. Gregor, he shoots in the face with the scoped rifle just because he doesn’t have time for this.

Cersei and Euron are already gone, into the caves. Some of the men who joined with Euron are gathering around, looking like they’re ready to step in and take over where Gregor left off, but they hesitate just long enough in the silence, and then they can hear the sounds of the approaching Baratheons.

The horses are on them before anyone can prepare. Riding in from the dark. Flashes of light as pistols fire. There are screams and there are gunshots. Jaime’s hat flies off his head, but otherwise he’s untouched. He leaves it all behind, and he heads into the cave.

He can hear Cersei and Euron down deep, and he follows. He finds a ladder that leads up, through a door in the top of the hill, and he climbs. They’re quite a ways ahead of him, but he knows they took this path. There’s no other way up.

Ladders aren’t easy with one hand, and he feels like an idiot once he’s halfway up and realizes he still has so far to go. By the time he gets up there, they’ll be long gone. But there isn’t anything else to do.

He pulls himself up at last. Down below, in the ruins of the old camp, he can see that the Baratheons have set fire to everything. Or maybe it was whoever remains of the Lannister gang, lighting everything up to obscure the rest with smoke. It looks hellish from up here, and the sounds of fighting are echoing, warped, made hellish. Jaime pauses to rest, trying to catch his breath, knowing that something has severed inside him.

There was never going to be any _going back _from this, but still it’s shocking to see. Almost heartbreaking, even though he hasn’t felt the same attachment to his gang since he lost his hand.

He turns to face the south, where he can see a path that continues along the rocky face of this cliff, and he follows it. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. Follow Cersei. Find Cersei. He doesn’t even have any idea what he’ll do when he finds her. What can he say to convince her to stop? Nothing. He knows he can’t. He knows she won’t listen.

He thinks of Brienne, standing back there in Pennytree, watching him go.

_Letting_ him go, even though she knew he was riding to his death. Even though she knew he was throwing his life away pointlessly. A fool to the end. He doesn’t know how to be anything else.

He’s following the path closely in the dark, and he doesn’t see Euron until the pumped-up little idiot is lunging at him from out of the shadows. Jaime manages to avoid a stab from a knife that catches the edge of the moonlight at the exact right moment, warning him of its approach. Euron spins and goes for him again, but Jaime manages to dodge it that time, too, and he punches Euron with his stump, the end of his wrist making a satisfying battering ram to slam into Euron’s temple.

But Euron only laughs, and he comes in for another hit.

Euron fights like he does everything else: seemingly nonsensically. He laughs and spins and stabs and screams and makes a mess of everything he tries to do. Still, he’s effective. It’s all Jaime can do to shake him off, and he takes two stab wounds to the side before he manages to wrestle the knife away and fling it over the side of the cliff.

Euron beats Jaime back, and he gets him on the ground. Jaime fights, swinging and connecting and even resorting to biting, once, but it just isn’t enough. He’s too old, maybe. Too tired. Too beaten down. The one hand doesn’t help. Euron stands over him when it’s done, a pistol in his face.

“I thought that’d be a little harder,” Euron says, laughing again. Jaime turns his head to the side and spits out blood. He’s suddenly very tired.

There is a sound of rustling skirts, sweeping over the rocks. Cersei, looking pale and beautiful in the moonlight as she sweeps out from the path.

“Leave him,” she says. Her voice is steady. She does not sound particularly bothered to see Jaime there, at Euron’s mercy. “We need to go,” she says, slightly louder, trying to get Euron’s attention.

“We need to take care of this,” Euron says. “Or he’ll keep following.”

Jaime stares up at his sister, and Cersei stares back down at him. He can feel his blood leaking out into the dirt, staining the stone beneath him. He can feel all the years of his life catching up to him. He gave up everything for her. He gave up Brienne. He gave up on what little shred of honor he could have held onto. He did it for _her_, and she doesn’t want it any more than he wanted to give it.

“I gave you all that I had,” he tells her. Her green eyes are steady on his. Her hands tremble as she clutches her skirts. “I did.”

She doesn’t say anything. She looks devastated, but only for a moment before she controls her expression. Hides it.

She looks at Euron.

“Let me finish him off,” he says. Cersei turns and looks at Jaime one more time. One-handed, going gray. He isn’t the mirror anymore that she loved to look into, and he knows it.

“Wait until I’m gone,” she says at last, and Jaime closes his eyes.

It makes sense, he supposes. After everything. He knew, he _should _have known, that he wasn’t the exception that he liked to believe he was. She loved him. He knows that. He clings to that still. She loved him once, but she hasn’t for a long time. It’s his fault for believing that there was a chance. His fault for following her as long as he did, even when he knew he wouldn’t have followed her if she was anyone else.

He just didn’t know how to do anything else but try to save her.

“I fucked her, you know,” Euron says, once Cersei has gone. “Your sister.”

“Cersei knows how to lure in the stupidest of men,” Jaime concedes, sighing. He spits out another wad of blood. “Do you have whiskey or something? Wash the taste out of my mouth?”

“Sorry, friend,” Euron says. He laughs a little, and he raises the pistol. “But I can make that taste go away for you.”

“Much obliged,” Jaime drawls.

“_Or_,” says a voice. Low and dangerous and beautiful and _stupid_. She’s so stupid for coming here, following him. “You could follow Cersei and be on your way, and I won’t have to kill you.”

Euron turns to look at her, and Jaime takes in the sight. She’s holding a shotgun she didn’t have when he left her, and she has one eyebrow cocked. She’s wearing the hat that got shot off Jaime’s head, back outside the cave. She looks incredible. Euron looks at her with frank disgust.

_Brienne_. She’s perfect.

“I thought you were dead,” Euron says.

“_I_ thought you were safely away,” Jaime adds. Brienne huffs a mirthless laugh and ignores Jaime entirely.

“You thought Stannis Baratheon was enough to kill me? I killed him and two of his men with my hands tied. I killed seven Mummers with two guns in fewer than five seconds. You think you have a hope?”

“I think you’re all talk,” Euron says. He starts to relax his stance. He’s going to turn and shoot her. Bring his arm up and shoot her, and Jaime can’t…

But Brienne sees that, of course. She knows exactly what it means.

She shoots Euron. Straight in the chest. From this range, it’s deadly, and Euron drops in a gory splatter of blood, looking only vaguely surprised and mildly annoyed. Dead before he hits the ground, looking _affronted_, of all things.

“Be careful,” Jaime manages, rasping, trying to sit up. “Cersei’s still out there.”

“I saw her heading down the hill,” Brienne says. “She won’t be coming back for us.”

Jaime nods, and Brienne moves to stand in front of him. There’s still blood on her shirt from where she got shot, earlier, and there’s a new wound on her arm that looks like it was made by a knife. He longs to touch her, his one hand twitching, the fingers itching to grab onto her and never let go.

“Are you all right?” he manages to ask.

“Better off than you, I think,” she answers. She’s looking at him warily, like she expects him to be angry with her for following him. Maybe he is. He can’t quite decide. “Can you stand?”

“Not without your help,” he admits, and she bends down and pulls his maimed arm over her shoulder so that she can haul him to his feet.

They both stagger a little, leaning back against the big rock behind them. The sun is coming up now. Jaime smiles into it. He remembers, once, around the campfire, saying that he wanted to die facing the sunset. Feels nice and poetic to choose to live while watching it come up, instead.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she huffs again. He looks up at her. She’s got blood on her face, and he uses his shaking hand to wipe it off with his thumb. “I mean it. I am. I didn’t want to drag you down with me. I thought I had to come here. Had to save her. I was an idiot. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t ever do that again. I’m not something frail you need to protect. I can handle myself.”

“I know you can.”

“But you left me there anyway.”

“I didn’t think there was any way out for me. I wanted you to live.”

“And I wanted _you _to live. Why’s that so hard for you to understand?”

He looks away from her to keep from crying again. Seems he does all his crying in front of her. It would be humiliating if she didn’t tell him once that the moment she saw him cry for the first time was the moment she fell in love with him. She uses one finger to tip his chin up so she can look at him properly.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t know why that’s so hard.”

She smiles a little, and he knows she understands. Big, unlovable Brienne. Ran away from home. Married a man who only loved men because she thought it was the best she could expect from life. Ugly and homely and too big to make a decent wife to anyone. She’s had her own share of thinking she was no good.

“You are enough for me,” she tells him. “Am I enough for you?”

“You’re too much for me. You’re more than me.”

“That’s not what I asked, Jaime. Am I enough for you?”

“Yes,” he breathes. She kisses him. Slow. Gentle. Sweet. This is the last kiss they should have had if he wasn’t so scared at Pennytree. He wants to cry again, knowing it doesn’t have to be the last now.

“Then that settles it,” she says. “So stop running away.”

They have to go. The Baratheons will take a while to get up here. They’ll be busy searching through the caves and fighting off the other members of the gang for a while yet. But they’ll get up here eventually, and Jaime and Brienne should be long gone before they do. But Brienne takes the time to dress his wounds a little, bandaging them up so he doesn’t bleed out. He does the same for her, as best as he can with one hand, and she helps him with tying off the bandage when he can’t.

He holds that spot on her arm, after, looking at it. Watching the blood seep through. Knowing that she came after him. Knowing that she risked everything for him.

“Hey,” she says. He looks at her. She takes his hat off her head and puts it back on his. She smiles, her teeth large and crooked. She is so _much_. “We’re still breathing.”

“We’re still breathing,” he agrees with a wan smile.

“Then let’s go,” she says. “You think you can make it down the mountain with me?”

He smiles.

“I can make it,” he says, like a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think that Cersei made it to Dorne on her own and met back up with Ellaria, and the two of them joined forces to try and swindle Oberyn out of some money, only to end up all fucking a lot and enjoying Dorne so much that they never go back to Westeros.
> 
> And of course Jaime and Brienne buy a little cabin and Jaime owns a stable and Brienne becomes a bounty hunter and runs jobs with Pod and they have like the nicest life ever.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from See the Fire in your Eyes from the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack, which is basically all I listened to while writing this entire story
> 
> also, I finally made myself a tumblr: angel-deux-writes. I've done literally nothing with it so far, but I'll get around to it!


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